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October 13, 2004

SBC Head Says Cingular Will Ship Voice over Wi-Fi

By Glenn Fleishman

In a confirmation of what many level-headed folks have been saying in the cellular industry for years, Wi-Fi will supplement scarce 3G spectrum to overload voice traffic: The technical head of SBC reveals what some had guessed part of his strategy might be. Among many prongs, SBC has aggressively pushed Wi-Fi gateways into homes, and gone from zero to 60 in the hotspot market by signing a massive client (The UPS Store), and becoming the first McDonald’s/Wi-Fi World partner with Wayport.

Now, CTO Chris Rice says that Cingular will offer phones by 2006 that switch voice from Wi-Fi to cellular automatically. This kind of handoff will effectively Cingular more spectrum, as Rice puts it in this Reuters interview. Rice seems to be saying—as Carlo Longino points out—that the Cingular phones would use whatever SBC Wi-Fi was available, whether in private homes or at hotspots. That’s a strange idea, but with 802.11e (quality of service) and Wi-Fi gateways that supported it, the Cingular phones could conceivably override a SBC’s DSL subscriber’s own data packets for priority! Very very odd idea, and we’ll see if a clarification is made on that front.

SBC will offer a Wi-Fi/cell phone to businesses first, and work with them to install the right VoIP equipment in house, starting in 2005. In 2006, they’ll offer consumer-based Wi-Fi/cell switching. [link via The Feature’s Carlo Longino]

(Correction to the Reuters article: The article misstates who is installing Wi-Fi at McDonald’s and the total number SBC plans to install: SBC has promised 20,000 access points but only 6,000 hot spots, and is handling the Internet back-haul and network but not the store infrastructure or the actual deal with McDonald’s. Wayport has the contract with McDonald’s. For The UPS Store, Wayport is acting as a managed services firm for SBC.)

Posted by Glennf at October 13, 2004 9:07 PM

Categories: 2.5G and 3G, Cellular, Future, Home, Voice

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Tracked on October 18, 2004 7:45 AM

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