I’ve written before how French broadband provider are innovative and have brought many triple-play offers (Internet, phone, TV) at very good prices. Now one of them, and others are likely to follow, is trying to add a fourth aspect to it, mobile telephony. Neuf telecom is testing a service that uses a Wifi - GSM Windows Smartphone. At home it connects over Wifi to your ADSL modem and uses VoIP. Anywhere else, it acts as a normal GSM phone. Neuf Telecom is creating an MVNO to support this.

Now the web site doesn’t say it, but I assume the same phone number is being used in both configurations. It doesn’t say neither what happens if I walk our of the Wifi coverage during a call, is the call cut of or if there is a hand-over to a GSM call? And I assume this only works with your own Wifi network at home, not in a hotel for example. There are a lot of challenges with making this an attractive product for the mass market. Dual mode GSM Wifi phones are still rare and expensive, and they need a high-level operating system such as Windows Smartphone to run their VoIP application. But it’s still very cool.

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