[babble]

For 19.90 euros a month, Kabel Deutschland (KD) offers its customers:

- a 6 MBit/s broadband connection
- 3 landlines
- a sim card which can be used to call other KD sims and KD landlines for free

If a KD customer has an asterisk server, or a Fritz box, it can be set up to provide a voip callthrough service. In other words, the customer can set up his/her own "betamax-like" voip service.

For some people, this setup (together with the associated voip charges) will be cheaper than using mobile voip to make calls. For example, in my case, I pay 5.82 GBP (approximately 6.50 euro) for the Tescointernetphone "Anytime" tariff to make all my landline calls to:

Andorra, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Gibralter, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, USA, Vatican City and Venezuela. Plus calls to mobiles in Canada, China, Hong Kong, Singapore and USA.

Using callthrough on my own Fritz box, I have very little need to use mobile voip.

In practice, yes, your granny is going to find it difficult to setup her voip accounts in a Fritz box. However, if you set it up for her, you can also store the numbers that she needs in the memory of her telephone or mobile phone. For example, to call the ficticious telephone number of say, Gordon Brown, you would only need to store the sequence:

Telephone number of Granny´s Fritz Box + PIN + 0 + 0044207210xxxx

When she wants to speak to Gordon, she would find his name in her mobile phone phonebook and then press the "dial" button just as she normally does.

Okay, I have to admit, for some people it will make more economical sense to pay for mobile voip. So, I guess that I exaggerated a little about the death of mobile voip. Sorry!