The WiFi Cell Phone & Why the Telephone Companies Hate Cell Phones with WiFi

The WiFi cell phone has been identified by cell phone carriers as an up and coming threat to their revenue streams. Their concerns are well founded. Mobile VoIP or VoWiFi has the potential to evolve into a serious problem for them. It's possible that millions of WiFi cell phone users will either terminate their contracts with carriers or scale down plan minutes.

There is a precedent and the cell phone carriers are well aware of it. They had the opportunity to witness the impact of VoIP on wire line carriers. They lost millions of subscribers and their core product "voice" was irreversibly devalued.
There are parallels between the history of VoIP and developments in the world of WiFi. Neither technology was taken seriously in the beginning, but both have now become mainstream. We initially became familiar with WiFi in our homes. Subsequently it was adopted by business and then continued to spread like a virus to hotels, airports, public libraries and hot spots. The net result is that millions of us have been exposed to the technology and feel comfortable using it. It's simple, robust and getting better all the time.

Last words

No contemporary cultural artifact embodies the genius and the disruptive excess of capitalism as clearly as the cell phone. Ubiquitous in most developed societies in Europe, the Americas and Asia, the cell phone has become a laboratory – some would say an asylum – for testing the limits of technological convergence. Less a telephone today than a multi-purpose computer, cell phones are game consoles, still cameras, email systems, text messengers, carriers of entertainment and business data, nodes of commerce. Particular age cohorts and subcultures have begun to appropriate cell phones for idiosyncratic uses that help to define their niche or social identity. Today’s Forum will examine the cell phone as a technological object and as a cultural form whose uses and meaning are increasingly various, an artifact uniquely of our time that is enacting, to borrow the words of a contemporary novelist, “a ceaseless spectacle of transition.”