Last week I was up in Shetland with work. Unless you are on Vodafone mobile signal up there is pretty patchy. This got me thinking.
Why can you roam onto other networks in the UK like you can when you are abroad? I know this would cost a lot for calls etc. but there are times when you don't really care about that. Why can't I tell my phone to connect to anything that it can find and let me worry about the charges?
Another thought occured to me (dangerous stuff this 'thinking'). Do you think we will ever see the phone functions on a mobile moving over to a VOIP type application? Surely there is no technical reason why I couldn't use a wirless network (provided by the hotel I'm staying in) as the data connection for my calls and texts. My number would still be provided by t-mobile, so would my GSM/3G connection when I'm in range, but if I can't get a mobile signal but can get wireless I can just use that as the transport.
Couldn't this work out quite profitable for the operator? Last week I would have been making calls and tending texts (which I would have been paying for) without actually using the t-mobile infrastructure. t-mobile would only be doing as much work as the likes of Skype or any other VOIP provider does.
This is perhaps too radical a departure for the big telecoms firms to get their head around. It might be a bit like how the record labels can't deal with downloads. Or perhaps all we need is ubiquitus wifi or WiMax or the 700MHz spectrum to be released. Who knows.


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