>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/29/technology/29phones.html?th&emc=th > >July 29, 2006 > >The Wi-Fi in Your Handset >By MATT RICHTEL Looks like one of the better articles on this subject, because it goes beyond the usual superficial hype about how Wi-Fi can make everything free. The tradeoffs to the regional Bells are interesting. If they convert their entire voice telephony system to IP, they can forego the expensive connection-oriented switches they now use, like their SONET ADMs, so in principle they could save some infrastructure costs. On the other hand, if they now use primarily their voice telephony revenues to support their cable plants, and those plants are also shared by the packet-switched Internet, then the costs of maintaining these cabled networks will have to be covered some other way. I'd say, your broadband connection fees will go up, as you drop your traditional phone service fees. As to the Wi-Fi aspect itself, I'd say that there's no free lunch. As the article explains, Wi-Fi hotspots are hotspots because that's how Wi-Fi was designed to work. If it had been designed for ubiquitous coverage, like cell nets are, then the band would not have been unlicensed and there would have been a larger number of frequency bands available to it. And surely, if one expects seamless indoor and outdoor coverage from Wi-Fi, that's even more true. In any case, whatever company takes it upon itself to try to deploy continuous Wi-Fi coverage will end up doing what the cell companies have had to do, in terms of building up the RF infrastructure, and still I don't see how they can achiieve that goal legally over the Wi-Fi 2.4 GHz allocation. My take on this is that a wholesale shift to VoIP and use of Wi-Fi hotspots instead of, or in addition to, cell towers should, in principle, be the telco-oriiented equipment vendors like Nortel and the smaller cell phone companies. In the US, there would be a consolidation of wireless telephone companies as the wireless telephone protocol becomes a single standard. Maybe fewer cell towers overall, but each one capable of carrying more traffic. However, it seems that companies which now provide the lion's share of the cabled plant or the cell tower RF plant could restructure their costs and revenue streams, and ultimately survive. Someone still has to provide the infrastructure. As usually happens, as a particular technology matures, the equipment and service providers consolidate. Similar to what happened to the family farm. Consumers come out ahead, in the sense that costs are kept low by greater economies of scale, but of course this won't stop anyone from vilifying the few gargantuan survivors in the game. Bert _________________________________________________________________ On the road to retirement? Check out MSN Life Events for advice on how to get there! http://lifeevents.msn.com/category.aspx?cid=Retirement ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.