The humble mobile phone has been a big part of our lives for over ten years now, I look back with a fuzzy nostalgic feeling at my first Nokia, which in all honesty was mainly used for calling my mum to come and pick me up, and compare it to the sleek, wafer-thin, touchscreen smart-phones of 2010.
It is almost laughable to think that we used to covet chunky handfuls of cheap plastic with clumsy aerials, soft plastic buttons and LCD screens. Looking back, I didn’t even really know why I owned a cell phone, it was just the ‘done thing’, fast forward ten years and a mobile phone is THE essential ‘can’t-be-without-it’ lifestyle tool, not just used for making calls, more a device for negotiating the digital landscape.
Of course the hardware has come on leaps and bounds, for a long time the handset market was a fairly level playing filed with a number of key manufacturers fighting it out, today the iPhone has monopolized the smart phone market, anyone who’s anyone in the I.T ‘it’ crowd posses one. In terms of software, that is, the cellular data networks on which mobiles operate, much remains unchanged. Service providers have been and gone in various guises, anyone remember One2One. The ‘top up’ payment method is also dying a slow death but the bare bones nuts and bolts of the networks remain.
This may all be about to change in the near future however. With IP Phone networks slowly filtering into homes and Business Telephone Systems, it is only a matter of time before mobiles follow suit. The first indications of this revolution in waiting is the ability to use Skype applications on Smartphones, this allows the user to bypass their service provider and make free calls to certain numbers. Of course the phone will be unusable unless signed up to monthly billing system. This begs the question then, will a manufacturer release a Skype or VoIP Phone in mobile form?
Such a phone would only be operable nationwide once the UK had blanket Wi-Fi overage which is clearly some way off. Nevertheless it is still something for major network operators need to think about, will they adapt or simply branch out into separate markets in order to survive?
We have already seen diversification from Orange in the form of orange broadband, and O2 in a variety of non-telephony related ventures, is this in preparation for the VoIP overhaul? VoIP looks set to follow in the steps of freeview television, and eventually, high-speed internet access, it will at some point, be available across the UK and form yet another aspect of our digital lives.
