New phones combine cordless and cellular

Tired of paying separate phone bills for your home and your mobile phone while juggling multiple phone numbers and voice mail?

Reuters- USA Today

Before you abandon your standard home phone, consider the range of hybrids coming to the market that combine the best features of residential wired and wireless phones.

Verizon Communications, the largest U.S. telephone company, this week is expected to announce a new cordless-cellular phone that operates on regular telephone lines in the home and on the mobile networks when outside.

Ericsson, the world’s largest maker of wireless equipment, has developed technology called Mobile@Home that lets consumers use their cell phone to make calls from home via the Internet instead of using up valuable wireless minutes.

But while these phones improve the quality of indoor phone connections and offer more efficient use of existing network capacity, some industry observers say they doubt whether the products will make big inroads among mainstream users.

"(Telephone companies) want to own the total customer telecommunications experience. That’s the end game," said Jane Zweig, chief executive of Washington-based wireless consulting firm the Shosteck Group. "How that’s executed and implemented and whether the … user has the same desire is not as clear."

Certainly, the idea of one person, one phone, one phone number is not new.

The vision of the telecommunications industry, according to some analysts, is that eventually each person will carry one phone that makes calls using the best network available to them at any given location regardless of whether the connection is wireless, wireline or via the Internet.

Earlier attempts to jump-start this hybrid phone market have fallen short. In one of the highest profile examples, AT&T Corp. geared up some five years ago for a service dubbed "Project Angel," which promised to bring telephones and high-speed Internet to homes with a fixed wireless connection.

Both Verizon and Ericsson, however, believe circumstances have changed in the intervening years.

"Our customers are commonly frustrated by separate local, long distance and wireless invoices and having to deal with different companies that provide these different services," said Kevin Kirkland, vice president of sales for Verizon Avenue, which sells phone services to apartment dwellers.

"(We want) to provide the residents with a product they demand and that is a simple, easy, one-stop product," he said.

Verizon plans by next year to begin offering its combination phone device, made by privately held Axesstel, to apartment residents, who Kirkland says tend to spend more on telephone service.

Kirkland said the phone, and associated base station gear that switches over the calls, will retail for about $200.

Ericsson is talking with wireless operators about selling its own device, which will cost roughly $100 and allow users to switch between cellular and high-speed Internet networks using a Sony Ericsson phone with short-range wireless technology.

In a slightly different twist, Sprint PCS, the nation’s No. 4 mobile phone company, plans to offer customers a new technology next year that will let them hook up their mobile phones in their home. This will allow all outgoing calls — even those made on regular phones — to run over the wireless network and be billed on a single mobile phone bill.

Keith Mallinson, analyst with the Yankee Group, said hybrid phones will be less attractive to customers because the added in-house features are apt to make phone handsets more bulky. Most of these phones will have few choices in terms of color, style or added features such as built-in address book, calendar and e-mail access programs, he added.

Other analysts point to the logistical difficulty of providing such combo phones within families, where everyone might own a cell phone but share one home telephone line.

After all, consumers who want the convenience of one phone may be better off just using a cell phone and ridding themselves of their bulky landline phones and cords.

Another issue is the cost of the services. Telecommunications companies have long championed a "bundling" strategy in which they combine services like fixed, wireless and Internet in hopes of squeezing out more revenue per customer and improving customer loyalty.

But it remains to be seen how these hybrid systems will be priced.

"I understand what the network operators get from these services. They want to own the customer regardless of what network he is on," Shosteck’s Zweig said.

"What’s not clear to me is how many people actually want this service, how much are these services worth to people and how profitable is this business," she added.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-06-17-hybrid-phones_x.htm