Wireless convergence
The recent launch of the BT Fusion phone gives us a glimpse of the future where wired and wireless phones will become one. This is a mobile phone which, when you are inside your home, works as if it is your normal home phone. When you are at home, your calls are charged at normal land line rates and when you are out and about, the calls are charged at normal mobile rates.

The attraction of going mobile is obvious - customers can plug their phone in over the Internet and within minutes they will be logged in to their regular office phone extension, making and receiving calls as if they were at their desk.

At present, there are a number of options for VoIP customers to go wireless:

• A software phone can be loaded onto your laptop and used in a wireless hot-spot. This works very well and is frequently used by business travellers in hotels or airports etc.
• There are various software phones available for hand-held computers and PDAs. If you have a handheld computer and a Bluetooth headset then you can use a software phone to log-in to your phone system.
• Finally, there are now a number of Wi-Fi based phones available. These phones look and feel like mobile phones, but they use a wireless Internet connection to connect back to the phone system. These phones are beginning to become more usable, though they are probably not yet good enough for mainstream use. The main reason for this is that the manufacturers do not yet have sufficient experience in the mobile arena. Typically the manufacturers of wireless phones come from a background of designing consumer electronics and, as a result, the signal handling, battery life and user interface tends to let these phones down.