Selling wireless by the pound

At this years Wireless Event, held at Londons Olympia late last month, the message was clear: Wi-Fi has a real future as a communications medium in its own right, and not just as an add-on to other services.

The decision by Vodafone and Orange to strip the VoIP functionality out of Nokia N95 handsets, and a barrage of national press reports claiming that Wi-Fi radiation is a real and present danger, might suggest the future of Wi-Fi is not so assured. There was scant network presence here either. Only O2, with its grandly-named Device Zone, showed up.

But exhibitors at the event were bullish about the technologys prospects. The main reason to be cheerful for the industry is the sudden roll-out of wireless broadband as Wi-Fi is now marketed hotspots. There are tens of thousands of public access base stations now scattered across the UK.

The absence of any kind of real participation by the networks is down to a change in their direction on Wi-Fi, reckons Owen Geddes, newly-installed business development director with The Cloud, which runs the largest Wi-Fi network in the UK.

Geddes, who marketed the BT Fusion hybrid mobile/Wi-Fi device prior to joining The Cloud, claimed the decision by Orange and Vodafone to remove VoIP facilities from the Nokia N95 handset is telling.

I think the networks now view VoIP over Wi-Fi (mobile VoIP) as a potential threat to their revenues,he says. Where previously they were happy to promote Wi-Fi as a mobile data medium and add-on for business and serious consumer users, theyve woken up to what mobile VoIP is really capable of.

Because of the advances in mobile VoIP, Geddes says The Cloud is now changing its own marketing direction. The company plans to move away from being purely a white label provider of Wi-Fi services to third parties, including mobile network operators.

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