The End of GSM?

A recent study has shown that IP Telephony has been slow to catch on in Denmark. Leading analysts have been quick to conclude that everybody will be much better off by ditching both PSTN- and IP Telephony in favor of the GSM-net: more and more people are only using their mobile - thus making it more expensive to call them via IP-telephony or PSTN than via GSM, it is argued.

However, this argument fails to take into account several very important recent developments: numerous new high-end mobile-phones - such as the entire E- and N-series from Nokia have build support for IP Telephony. This means that it is possible for you to phone your contacts either cheap or free - and for them to call you either cheap or free. Of course, you need to either use a WLAN-connection or to have a decent plan for data-usage with your carrier - preferably a flat-rate plan.

Some people seem to think that the IP Telephony in these phones are only to be used with a WLAN-connection - thus limiting the usefulness of the whole idea severely. But this is simply mistaken. IP Telephony can be used perfectly well with 3G-connections.

Furthermore, some new providers of IP Telephony are focusing exclusively on IP Telephony on mobile phones - prominent among them is the very interesting London-based Truphone - who is also offering excellent software to manage an account with them on your phone (with automatic switching between WLAN- and 3G-connection, for example). Another very interesting new piece of software in this category is Fring - which will allow you to chat with and/or call your Google Talk-, Skype- or Fring-concacts for free or to call landline and mobile phones using either an account with a SIP-provider or SkypeOut.

Another indication of the future of IP Telephony on mobile phones is the fact that flatrate dataplans are getting much more common. Here in Denmark the mobile carrier 3 is offering so-called Mobile Broadband which can be used both with a computer or a phone. In my opinion, this a very powerful product with a bright future as it enables you to collect all your internet- and phone-activities in one package (not to mention being online on your laptop wherever you go). I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of product should turn out to become leader of its kind both in the internet-field and in the phone-field - just because it combines the two fields in a very efficient and powerful way. Most probably it will soon become even more poweful - for example offering interesting content-packages which you can access from you pc or from your phone as desired (TV-channels, for example, as 3 is already offering Mobile TV here in Denmark).

Excellent article on all this at BBC