A bit similar idea to dual-mode GSM/wifi handsets. I wonder of people will be confused by the choice.

Of course, it should be nearly free rather than just cheap - buy ?50 hardware and make calls for 1p per minute seems a bit unlikely unless the gear becomes available without contract

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/st...1766502,00.html

Instead of cheap roaming -- I can also see expensive roaming e,.g. the restaurant roaming network. A little mesh wire behind the plaster, a little lead paint on the walls, and you can call your home in the same country for only 45p a minute.

T-Mobile is coming out with this in the US. They call it UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access). The phone is a combination of GSM and WiFi. A lot of people are excited but I'm pretty much underwhelmed by it. In Japan they have a type of cellular called PHS where you have a little base station in your home and then there are thousands of other little stations in vending machines, etc. all over the place. Obviously it only works in town.

The bit I don't figure is that at the moment, no roaming is possible in the same country, which means the person's main network will have to be persuaded to allow itself to lose money by relinquishing the calls, unless people are going to mess about swapping SIMs etc. Stu could be right

So I would assume that the UMA setup also relies heavily on their HotSpot network in certain areas? I haven't heard anything about this coming to Germany. I don't use their HotSpots since there is always some cafe here in Cologne that has free W-LAN/WiFi access.

Exactly. It seems that there millions of people who spend 1/2 their lives in Starbucks coffee shops and will gain a big advantage from lower calling and data rates via UMA. :wacko:

Funny how that idea is being pioneered over in the US and T-Mobile in Germany is absolutely mum about introducing that here. Starbucks has been expanding like crazy and T-Mobile/T-Com (DT's landline division) have HotSpots in almost any location you can think of.

As a roamer, however, there is a lot of appeal to voip to go. I use it on my laptop, but there are a lot of places I won't pull out my laptop, particularly given the increasing number of snatch and grabs in Starbucks, etc.

Almagamating VOIP into my handset looks very appealing. In fact, I'm look at the new Nokia E61 which is a symbian based device which is sect-band: 850/900/1800/1900/2100mhz plus Wi-FI. If there is a good Symbian based VOIP program, this could prove very interesting

The problem is that the WiFi has to be pretty good for VoIP. Where I am now, I have access to free WiFi in the nearby coffee shop but it is very bursty and will pause for several seconds. I tried checking my voicemail with VoIP at this hotspot and gave up the idea of using VoIP there. IMHO, WiFi & cellular don't really mix very well. It would be better to use another 2.4 GHz unlicensed technology. Maybe just very low power EDGE at 2.4 GHz, but I have no idea if that can even be done.