Portable IP phones to displace cell phones?

Great Debates
1

Wha’t s to stop portable IP phones from displacing cell phones as the portable phone of choice? Cell phones are highly computerized and so are IP phones.
IP phones offer free and built-in: voice mail
caller ID
call waiting
call forwarding
and more

Calls made through computer networks now sound excellent. This one company charges $15 a month for the line but you get 500 minutes to call anywhere in Canada and the US.

I would expect to see an explosion in the popularity of IP phones.

2

I assume your are comparing a WiFi IP phone with standard mobile phones? If so, mobile phones currently have two advantages: coverage (which is partially a function of the RF technology) and hand-offs. WiFi coverage has increased in hot-spots only. Mobile phone coverage is complete for urban areas and along major highways. Additionally, the WiFi hot-spots are effectively wireless islands. If you are using a WiFi IP phone and walk from one hot-spot to another, chances are your call will drop as the phone re-negotiates a new IP address. There are standards now (or in progress) to support WiFi hand-offs, but these will still require the cooperation of the hot-spots.

Mobile phones are becoming generic computing platforms and the wireless standards are handing out IP addresses. It shouldn’t be long before you can just create a phone application that runs on your mobile phone and accesses the internet to make its calls (rather than the mobile phone network).

Wired IP phones are making big in-roads in residental and enterprise markets. We should see WiFi IP phones make a strong move into these markets very soon.

3

Very important point. I live in a large city (~200k population) and the only places I know of with WiFi access are the airport, some coffee shops, and a few blocks downtown. The attraction of a cell phone is that it works anywhere you’re likely to be; until WiFi phones can do that, they won’t offer much competition.

I’m sure this is already possible with Palm/PocketPC phones, and possibly with Java and BREW on less powerful phones. Problem is, accessing the internet through the cellular network isn’t necessarily any cheaper than making a regular phone call.

4

Very good point and I wonder if it will ever be.