There was a sudden splurge of old Vodafone Betavine blog posts through Planet Mobile Web at the end of last week, amongst which I spotted a post from Kevin Smith about BT FON. That reminded me of their recent announcment and reminded me too that I had been quite surprised about it at the time.
It was just a few short months ago that a number of people pinged me to find out if I had been arrested for theft of Wifi service (I live in Chiswick, West London), but no it was not me. I was at the same time impressed that the police realised that a crime was being committed and depressed that they were spending time cautioning people for stealing Wifi. Especially because now, it seems, all that is history. BT FON is all about sitting on garden walls and using other people’s Wifi.
Kevin says that BT FON not much use if you’re walking the dog. I’m not sure, actually, that the Mobile Web is much use while you are walking along, whether or not you’re using BT FON – too much danger of bumping into things. The ability to communicate while “in motion” with seamless connectivity and complicated stuff like hand-off is very important for voice. Much less so for Web browsing. Wifi is fine if you are sitting on a garden wall, like the hapless fellow who got arrested (no, really, it wasn’t me), sitting in a coffee shop etc.
On the other hand I think that VoIP over Wifi has different mobility issues associated with it. The main issue today, as far as I can see, is that it really doesn’t work at all well when you are stationary, let alone worrying about hand-off. That’s sure to improve, I’m sure, and I hope it does soon.
So here’s the question: is Kevin really browsing the web on his phone, while walking the dog, or is he trying to establish a VoIP connection to speak to his granny in Australia as part of an assessment of the threat to Vodafone’s voice revenues?
