Double-duty Cell Phones Could Put You in Touch Anywhere

Honestly, how many phones are you forced to juggle every day? How many phone numbers do your friends and colleges have to plug into their address book, just to get hold of you? And how much time and money does it cost you and your employer to handle all those phones and numbers? I have two U.S. numbers, four Swedish numbers, Skype and SkypeIn, all in all, eight entries. Guess how many handsets!

But now, as it seems, there is a solution: Unlicensed Mobile Access or UMA phones that bridge two of the worlds’ most ubiquitous wireless standards, GSM and wlan, designed for seamless voice and data connections between them.

Motorola introduced its first UMA phone a year ago, Sony Ericsson also has one, and Nokia last week introduced its first, the Nokia 6136, for Europe and the U.S. at the 3GSM conference in Barcelona.

Any of these gadgets might finally enable us to stick with one handset at home, in the office, and anywhere else.

The motivation to develop interoperability between Wi-Fi and cellular technology was triggered by the need in the U.S. market to have better cell coverage in homes, where service often is inadequate and Wi-Fi access can be used to complement the cellular service, Nokia director Olli-Pekka Lintula told me at a January seminar in Stockholm.

There is no carrier deal for the U.S. market to be announced here. But naturally there has been interest and discussion, Lintula informed me the other day.

But this could be the end of the road for pure VoIP companies, if telcos with big financial muscles use UMA-based phones to fight off upstart VoIP-only firms like Vonage or Skype, for that matter. The supposition is that these companies need to partner with telcos to access the cellular infrastructure but not vice versa.

Such partnerships already occur in Europe where Orange, one of the world’s largest telecom operators, will be the first to sell the Nokia UMA phone, for about $350.

But Skype last week clinched an important deal with mobile 3G phone operator 3 which says it will start to offer Skype services across its networks later this year, aiming to increase its customer base.

Put it vice versa. This might be the end of the world for the traditional telcos instead, as IDC's VOIP analyst William Stofega explained to me. VoIP calls are generally much cheaper and render less or no income to the traditional carrier.

And this is especially powerful now, because I think VoIP networks are becoming the most ubiquitous, with Wi-Fi build-outs to cover whole cities. Where that happens UMA phones could seriously drain traditional companies.

One thing is for sure, we’ll soon see a huge battle, and hopefully we, the customers will be the winners.

By the way, you might wonder why I have four Swedish phone numbers? It's because I’m a Swedish reporter with this great scholarship, giving me the chance to work for PC World in San Francisco the entire spring. One task is to find ways to improve reporting on the innovations system.