Cheesy Musings

Back in the early 90s there was a mobile phone service called Rabbit. The technology wasn’t the analog cellphone network, they were not trying to create a network of universal overlapping cell coverage like the other guys were. The Rabbit technology had a range of about 100m to the base station, you had to look for a rabbit sign to make a call. This sounds a bit rubbish these days, but you have to remember that this was started in 1989 and it was designed to compete with public callboxes, not with the cellphone networks which quickly grew up and boiled the unfortunately timed bunny.

This blast from the past is now being brought up to date with the Skype Wifi phone with La Fonera. Now I can see that this is a cool thing to have in your home, a digital cordless phone that has the call costs and quality of Skype (which has a much greater frequency response than a regular phone or even a SIP phone), and of course having a Fon hotspot is great too. The bit I don’t get is the idea of roaming about with it in search of hotspots. I can completely understand WiFi roaming with a laptop, if you find a hotspot you can stop and use it, if you don’t, you just work locally. With a mobile phone however there are two big reasons that this isn’t good enough, firstly it’s only function (well apart from silly games and perhaps a camera) is to communicate with other people whenever and wherever you might be. Secondly a phone also takes incomming calls, and you can’t really synchronise your visits to a hotspot to coincide with an inbound call.

I might still get one as a home device, but I certainly wouldn’t get one for the purpose it seems to be aiming at. Fon is cool, VOIP is cool, but VOIP+Fon is not a mobile phone network.

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