BT's Converged Wi-Fi/Cell Phone

judgecorp writes "BT has been talking for more than a year about "Bluephone" - a cellphone that roams to a wireless network, when you are in the house. Just when we thought it was all hype and vapour, BT is revealing more details. Good news - it will move to Wi-Fi, when Wi-Fi handsets are cheap and good. The first version will still use Bluetooth, because Bluetooth works. Bad news - it's not a SIP phone, and therefore not really a converged phone. It doesn't roam calls onto the Internet, or even onto the landline, where they would be cheaper. Wi-Fi or Bluetooth is just an alternative for the first few feet of the call. Takes a few calls off the cell network, but doesn't do a lot for the user, apart from giving you just one phone to lose."

Comments

Not going to make a difference...

[chris09876]

This isn't going to be a replacement for cell phones. I don't think the bluetooth capability is that much of a benefit. Needing the base station really limits where you can use it. They did say that they'd have a WiFi version in 2006 though... that has potential :) Cell + data coverage is just unnecessarily expensive.

I use a Cisco Wi-Fi cellphone everyday

[bbeebe]

I work in IT for a large (35 sites) K-12 campus. We have Wi-Fi spanning most of the area and I use a Cisco 7920 to make/receive calls anywhere, internal and external.

Granted we're running Call Manager for this to work, but it's pretty sweet none the less.