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Nokia’s first VoWLANs phones come this year
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Posted by: CA

Nokia’s first VoWLANs phones come this year

Timo Poropudas

Nordic Wireless Watch - October 2, 2005 at 15:50 GMT
Olli-Pekka Lintula will be speaking at October 3 MobileMonday meeting in Helsinki.

Nokia plans to start selling VoWLAN phones already this year for businesses. And the first dual mode consumer model will hit markets in the first half of 2006 according to Olli-Pekka Lintula, director of strategic marketing at the technology platforms division.

“All future phones for enterprises from Nokia will also be wi-fi equipped,” Lintula told Dow Jones Newswires a month ago.

In June, U.K. telephone company BT Group PLC launched a service using a Motorola’s bluetooth handset. The phone functions as a mobile phone outside the home but switches on to a cheaper broadband fixed line inside the house.

TeliaSonera is currently testing a similar service in Denmark and plans a commercial launch next year. Later the company intends to bring the service to its other markets.

BT has said it plans to use wi-fi technology once better handsets become available as the current ones are too bulky for the consumer market, DJNW reports.

Nokia predicts there will be speedy growth for phone calls transported over Internet-based wireless networks.

Theoretically some 88 percent of the traffic handled by mobile networks could migrate to new Internet-based networks, Lintula said.

The number is based on the assumption that all workplaces and homes will have a wi-fi network installed and all mobile subscribers will have a wi-fi enabled handset.

According to Lintula it’s still questionable whether using VoWLAN will actually be much cheaper. There is much to be done on a standard method connecting calls between users on different networks. Even more important hindrance is the lack of charging method.

Nokia forecasts that there will be just over 100 million wi-fi enabled phones globally by 2009, up from a few million this year. Still, Nokia believes that actual mobile networks will keep gaining ever-larger share of voice and data traffic.
http://www.nordicwirelesswatch.com/...l?story_id=4416