Richard Percival

Terminal 1 LHR

Consultant

Skype works together with WiFi: on Monday I called the help desk of BTOpenZone while waiting in the departure lounge at Heathrow, using just a headset plugged in my Centrino laptop. The joke is that the cost for the phone part on Skypeout was about 1.5 cents a minute, whereas the BTOpenzone wireless broadband charge is 20 times as much. Now all we need to really start the revolution is to have peer-to-peer gridded WiFi sharing the cost of the mobile broadband connection to the Internet between the users and bring down the "last mile" cost to Skypeout-type levels. Then the game would really be up for the incumbents. The help desk thought I was calling from a mobile, the quality was fine, and when I said what I was doing the technician said it was the first time he had had knowingly had such a call. I guess it won't be the last.