|
|
|
Cellular breakthrough
Next year, if a bright idea takes off, your mobile could spontaneously offer you cheaper calls. New operators are planning to put low-power transmitters in railway stations and shopping centres. When your mobile gets within 200 metres, it will pick up the new cell, you can roam to it and the provider will give you mobile calls at the price you would expect to pay for landline calls.
“We’re champing at the bit,” says Martin Wren-Hilton, chief executive of Coffee Telecom. “It’s a great opportunity for consumers to have more choice.”
Coffee has been developing the service at its Richmond office for the past two years, says Wren-Hilton, a 39-year-old entrepreneur who is said to have had a hand in the creation of mobile phone top-up cards.
The service is similar to BT’s Fusion, which lets a cellphone roam to a Bluetooth base station and (in a future version) a Wi-Fi hotspot. But, unlike Fusion and other “fixed-mobile convergence” services, it uses the same GSM technology as your existing phone service — and it works with existing handsets.
Independent micro-cells have not been possible before, because the GSM radio spectrum is licensed to the big operators. Sometime in the next year, however, Ofcom, the regulator, will auction off enough spectrum for small operators such as Coffee to do their own thing.
When radio spectrum was allocated for phones, a small gap — known as a “guard band” — was left between the frequencies used by mobiles and cordless phones. “We’re able to release that spectrum now, because technology has moved on,” explains Ofcom spokesman Simon Bates.
“Today’s GSM mobiles and Dect cordless phones can deal with the interference. We propose to release the guard band to the market as quickly as we can.”
It’s Ofcom’s first “technology neutral” auction. Whoever gets the licences — for two bands at 1.78 GHz and 1.88 GHz — can use any technology, as long as they keep the power below 200MW. Earlier this year, Ofcom’s review of spectrum management decided that licence holders should be given a free hand to use any appropriate technology, as long as it does not interfere with users on neighbouring frequencies.
In this case, however, there’s little doubt how the spectrum will be used. There are tens of millions of GSM phones out there, ready to receive the signals without modifications. While 200MW isn’t enough power to set up a new national network, it’s fine for short-range cells.
Wren-Hilton’s proposed “Coffee Zones” would connect calls through an IP network to the telephone system. Calls to other Coffee users would be free, making Coffee a bit like Skype for your mobile. Calls out to other phones would cost about the same as those made on a BT landline. Outside the Coffee Zone, your phone reverts to its normal mobile service.
Business services could be even more interesting. The Coffee base station will hook up directly to the office phone system, so workers’ mobile phones will become office phone extensions. This could eliminate one of the biggest and most annoying items on corporate phone bills: the cost of mobile phone calls made while in the building.
“Coffee Telecom is the first of a new breed of fixed-mobile players,” says Wren-Hilton. “Customers will pay a high amount for full mobility, and smaller amounts for calls on the Coffee network.”
But the details need to be right. “Technologically, if the service is going to fully work, it will need the cooperation of the mobile operators,” says Amit Nagpal, senior consultant at Analysys Consulting. “I’d be very surprised if mobile operators were very keen to work with Coffee.”
Wren-Hilton dismisses this objection. “Our feedback, based upon discussion with the operators, is that in the long run they have more to gain than to lose, through roaming arrangements with us,” he says.
Coffee’s plans are evolving as these discussions continue. Early accounts of its service describe users manually re-setting their phone at Coffee Zones, but Wren-Hilton promises a slicker service based on a Coffee SIM card. “Users will get two numbers, one mobile and one geographic, based on a choice of 30 dialling codes,” he says. “It is like a portable landline, with cheap incoming calls.”
With a mobile operator as a partner, Coffee-enabled phones will be able to move smoothly on to the mobile network outside the Coffee Zone, says Wren-Hilton. The details of the pricing will involve many trade-offs. If users set up call-forwarding between their fixed and mobile Coffee numbers, they get one number, but will have to pay roaming charges when they receive calls.
However, all this is in the future. First, the auction must take place — and the date has still to be fixed. It won’t be a high-rolling affair like the 3G auction of 2000, says Bates, because it is most likely to be a single-round, sealed-bid auction. — Dawn/The Guardian News Service
|
|
|
|
