Will all business-oriented wireless phones be WiFi capable soon?

Posted May 20th 2006 2:29PM by Brian White
Filed under: WiFi, Cellular, Hardware, Applications

With this announcement in Japan -- and of course, KDDI and NTT DoCoMo are quite a bit more advanced than U.S. carriers -- will WLAN wireless phones become the norm the world over soon? We've seen a few WiFi-capable handsets here in the U.S., but they are designed for data access more than voice access.

Is the future trend one of providing municipally-available voice access using much-cheaper WiFi hotspots rather than incredibly-expensive cellular towers? You never know, but if something like this comes to pass, wireless voice calling (and the marketplace) will never be the same.

Reader Comments

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1. I don't understand: WiFi will take place towards GSM? But it has much less range of activity and technology is too young

Posted at 5:07PM on May 20th 2006 by Forme

2. No, it will compliment it. When I'm in my home with my Wi-Fi enabled handset, I get dead spots from the nearby cell-site but full strength from my wireless router. So my handset will jump on the Wi-Fi and use it for signal strength instead. You'd have full bars in urban areas where there is a strong Wi-Fi backbone and kick over to GSM sites when Wi-Fi is weaker or not available.

Posted at 7:12AM on May 21st 2006 by Krum 303

3. Interesting to see that Nokia has retracted an earlier statement that said all future enterprise handsets would have WLAN. The E50 announced last week is a comparatively basic device, without WLAN.

I'll be surprised if more than 20% (by sales volume) of enterprise-bought handsets have WiFi by 2009.

Posted at 4:21AM on May 22nd 2006 by Dean Bubley

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