Hosted PBX VoIP

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 playing snake, and compare it to the slick, shiny, tabular 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 black amd green LCD displays. Back then I didn’t even really know why I had a mobile, 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 field with a number of key mobile brands fighting it out, today the iPhone has monopolized the smart phone market, anyone who’s anyone in the I.T ‘it’ crowd has one. In terms of software, that is, the cellular data networks on which mobiles operate, not much has changed. 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 not too distant 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 country-wide once the UK had total Wi-Fi overage which is some way off at the moment. 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.