United Kingdom cell phone carrier Three is planning to bring mobile Skype to the market that has the potential to shake up the cell phone industry. Skype will be fully integrated on the new phone that is exciting news for people in the U.K., and Australia. Skype on cell phones is nothing new, we have seen it before, but it is the first time that we have seen it fully integrated. What does this mean for the cell phone industry?

I would expect to see Skype integrated on more smart phones in the future. It is only a matter of time before we start to see Blackberry and Nokia smart phones with integrated Skype. As market saturation increases, we will see VOIP become the protocol of choice for mobile communication.

Wireless networks are getting bigger, cheaper and more powerful than they have ever been before. As most cell phones are now Wi-Fi capable, it is certainly a possibility that we will start to see a major shift in traffic from cellular networks to wireless networks. Carriers that get into VOIP early will be the big winners. Carriers that resist will find themselves losing market share in a way that they never could have predicted. The smart thing for cellular providers now would be to start investing in wireless infrastructure and charging a flat monthly rate for access.

It is a great time for well-financed upstarts like Google to start to enter the U.S. market. Cellular carriers do not do a great deal to inspire customer loyalty. U.S. cellular communications are overpriced and some of the contracts seem downright exploitative to those of us that have lived in other countries. If people have a fixed price alternative that allows unlimited communication, they are going to snap it up; and it will take more than a snazzy graphical user interface and a touchscreen to bring them back.

Don’t think it is possible? My family is scattered all over the world. My parents live in one country, my siblings in another and I live here in Japan. At one point my monthly phone bill reached $600, my siblings racked up $1000 in a quarter and my parents did about the same. We were paying about $3,000 a quarter for international communications. Now we pay about $20. That $20 mainly consists of a quick phone call to tell one another to “get on Skype.” Mobile Skype has the potential to reduce our communications bills further and to add the convenience of cellular telephony to VOIP.

Three is onto a winner, look for an update when we get word of their prices.

Source: PC World

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