The pestilence of roaming charges may soon be gone forever. The evil practice of charging tourists both an extortionate fee to make a call, and an extortionate fee to receive a call, could be killed off this year as affordable voice over WiFi phones hit the market.
The cellular companies even have the cheek to charge for voicemails received abroad, as I found to my cost when my mobile account's credit had been wiped out by a pleasantly rambling voice mail message left while I was abroad on Valentine's night.
Meanwhile, of course, we not only have to get WiFi phones into the High Street shops, we have to get WiFi, i.e. public service, free-of-charge, WiFi, far more ubiquitous.
There is a case for assuming that, with affordable VOIP over WiFi phones becoming commonplace, there'll be more pressure on High Street shopping organisations, hotels, train stations, bus stations, airports, municipal authorities etc etc to make public service WiFi available.
Getting WiFi into handsets has not been easy. Power and cost have been the barriers. But Cambridge Silicon Radio has come up with a chip for adding WiFi for cellular costing as little as five euros, and reckons that the power consumption problems are fixed.
The prospect of liberation form roaming charges now looms into view. It really makes you think how jolly it will be when the cellular operators wake up one morning to find that all their customers have gone.
They will absolutely have deserved it by their greedy, gouging, Scrooge-like attitude to roaming charges.
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