On Thursday 18 January 2007 02:17, Renaissance Man wrote: > Anything that allows me to go from spending £45 plus a month on > mobile communications to effectively zero, including talking to my > parents who live on the other side of the planet, is revolutionary.
Don't forget that carriers have PLENTY of headroom on their prices and they happen to control their networks. So, if things get rough, and you do come up with a _vastly_ popular scheme to do cheaper communications (can't underline how vast this must be), they will accomodate. They will introduce new dialplans, might lock such FreeFi capable phones out and subsidize their phones even harder, etc. So the money potential you see here is just a result of their business plan, it isn't inherent in the WiFi+VoIP technology, and that's the KEY on this issue (you're just taking a shortcut, GSM really is far better suited for voice+phones). Business plans can be changed in an hour, hardware cannot, and that's where many telecom battles are lost. Actually, for me ATM it's FAR cheaper to buy a GSM module (they cost <50 euros nowadays), hook it up to my PC and declare it a family member number (=covered by flat rate subscription) and I could talk to Japan 3 hours a day without any extra cost. And wham - a simple ancient tech GSM link that is cheaper to operate than a WiFi capable phone, just by having a family member number dialplan. You will lose weeks and months making the WiFi hardware, testing the software and it went down in flames in the minute a carrier decided to make/change a dialplan. So WiFi from a business standpoint is good only where GSM can't go - and thats endless megabits in ethernet traffic, not voice (if you have it, cool, but it's not worth JUST for VoIP). What I don't get is why do you need WiFi (as in 801.b/g) for all of this, and why you cannot do this (in a work/home scenario) with Bluetooth as it is now? I understand the pleas of people who have poor GSM coverage, but they will always have to live with the technology that is available in the mainstream and accomodate to the environment they're in, just as I have to accomodate that the nearest WiFi hotspot is 300km+ away :) _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org https://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community