Interesting article from the UK on Vonage’s mobile VoIP service offering:

You’ve gotten rid of the wire that connects your phone to the world. Perhaps you’re also paying a flat monthly fee for unlimited VoIP calls from your home or office. Now, if a move by Vonage UK becomes popular, you’ll be able to make unlimited calls from your mobile phone as well.

U.S.-based Internet-phone company Vonage announced Wednesday that it is teaming up with The Cloud, a provider of wireless broadband, to offer a mobile-phone service that will rely on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology to let users make calls through Wi-Fi hotspots in the UK.

According to Vonage, there will be no cumbersome log-on to connect through a VoIP hotspot. Users near a hotspot will simply make their calls. But if those using the service move outside a hotspot’s range, the call will be cut off and the user will have to revert to a conventional cellular network to make and receive calls — complete with traditional per-minute rates.

Bringing It Together

The service is expected to begin in May in the UK. "This kind of service will probably not be available to American consumers until the first half of 2007," said Leif-Olof Wallin, an analyst at Gartner, "when there will be more cell phones with dual-mode [capabilities], such as GSM/Wi-Fi or CDMA/Wi-Fi."

GSM and CDMA are standards used by conventional mobile-phone networks, while Wi-Fi is the most popular wireless standard for accessing the Internet from home or through coffeehouse networks. Dual-mode phones will allow users to move between VoIP and conventional mobile-phone networks without changing handsets.