Research firm In-Stat predicts that the cellular modem market will see shipments of five million units this year, with 10% of them in the form of embedded, pre-integrated in the laptop rather than on a data card.
There are estimates to suggest that Newbury, UK-based Vodafone already has a million subscribers using data cards across its 26 properties and it is now ramping up the marketing for its embedded offering, in which connections to its network ship in laptops from Dell, Lenovo, HP and Acer.
The growth in cellular connectivity for laptops, together with the gradual expansion of flat-rate charging for mobile data services raises another question, however: how will the operators react if their subscribers start running VoIP over a data session as a means of reducing the mobile voice bill?
T-Mobile provoked negative remarks earlier this year when, in announcing its HSDPA (i.e. 3.5G) offering on data cards in the UK, it specified that Skype and other VoIP offerings were forbidden contractually from running over its network.
E-Plus has a deal with Skype in particular to offer its voice calling service, and more recently, in March this year Hutchison 3G, which has 3G licenses in six countries around Europe, said it would offer Skype clients for laptop users subscribing to its services.
In the US, meanwhile, CDMA operators took the opportunity of last week’s CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment show in Los Angeles to proclaim their intention of offering carrier-grade VoIP services once they upgrade to 1xEV-DO Revision A (Rev A).
For Vodafone, a spokesperson said, we don’t ban VoIP, though clearly it has to be monitored lest it start to occupy too much of the available bandwidth. This in itself is a shift from the stance of its German subsidiary in July last year, when it announced that it would cease to support VoIP on its 3G network from mid-2007. The furor was such that it was obliged to backtrack, not least by E-Plus’s speedy response.
