Click to View

Royal Philips Electronics announced this week that an unnamed major mobile operator has licensed its new unlicensed mobile access (UMA) compatible Nexperia 6120 chipset to launch converged Wi-Fi/cellular service in the U.S. There's a good chance that carrier is T-Mobile.

At the Consumer Electronics Show last month, PC Magazine reported seeing a T-Mobile branded Wi-Fi enabled Samsung SGH-T709 cell phone with the new chipset. T-Mobile is also the U.S. carrier with the largest investment in Wi-Fi hot spots and has been the slowest at rolling out a high-speed cellular network.

It all started two years ago—at the 3GSM World Congress—when T-Mobile announced plans to bring its cellular network and extensive investment in Wi-Fi together: Walk into a Café for a latte while on a GSM phone call and your automatically switched to a cheaper - and faster, for data services - 802.11 network.

Seamless wireless convergence has remained a hot topic for the mobile industry ever since, with some predicting 2006 would finally be the year working solutions finally reach mass market.

T-Mobile is, in fact, far behind operator competitors like Cingular, Verizon, and Sprint in the delivery of third-generation cellular data services to the U.S market. It isn't expected to fully launch its own 3G solution until next year. So perhaps the time is right for the carrier to better leverage that hot spot investment.

As mentioned, UMA phones automatically detect the fastest and most cost-effective network available, at home and on the road. Carriers would most likely charge a small flat fee for the service, saving customers a lot of money.

So, when a consumer with a UMA-enabled handset moves inside a Wi-Fi network, the phone switches his call from a cellular to a Voice over IP. It also allows them to use a single phone number at home and on the road.

The additional bandwidth of a Wi-Fi network could encourage mobile subscribers to use more data services; such as Web, e-mail, MMS, music, video, handset TV, etc. With voice revenue slowly declining, operators are looking towards content to make up the difference.

Many have already found they earn higher ARPU (average revenue per user) from customers with smartphones and advanced feature phones that offer these types of services, let alone on 3G networks that support them best.

SGH-T709
More features of the tri-band (850/1800/1900 ) GSM/GPRS/EDGE SGH-T709 (see top image) include a 1.3 megapixel camera, speech recognition, video recorder, MP3 player, speakerphone, and a slider design. There's no expansion slot, however. It measures 3.7 x 1.7 x 0.9 inches, weighs 3.3 ounces, and is supposed to ship during the second quarter.