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While Woosh has made the most noise, there are also a number of other players focusing on specific regions and hoping to spin a profit by delivering bits through the ether.

But data isn't the only aspect of our day-to-day communications that's going wireless.

A small but apparently growing number of people are ditching their local-loop connections and relying instead on cellphones to handle their voice traffic.

If you examine the economics, this can actually make a lot of sense in some cases -- particularly those of low income earners.

By the time you take into account things like wiring maintenance charges and perhaps one or two "smartphone" services, a simple residential landline phone connection can cost $40 per month.

That same $40 will buy you a moderate amount of cellphone connectivity -- especially if you do a lot of your talking off-peak or tend to receive more calls than you make.

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But things could get even worse for Telecom if/when companies like Woosh start rolling out their voice over IP (VOIP) services.

If this actually works as advertised, it could well become a whole lot cheaper to ditch that copper and pluck all your communication needs out of the air.

Well that's the theory anyway -- but there may be a few flies in the ointment.

First-up is the issue of reliability and consistency of quality.

If many of the reviews written regarding the Woosh service are to be believed, it is currently somewhat less than perfect -- something people might be prepared to accept if it means saving a fist-full of dollars over a full-blown JetStream account. I would wager however, that few people would be prepared to settle for a flaky voice service if it meant saving just $40 a month.

As I suggested in a previous column, what would really spin the market's wheels would be if Woosh and Vodafone got themselves well and truly hitched to the extent that, between the two of them, it became possible to produce a totally seamless connectivity system.

I refer to a cellphone/data-modem that would opt to use the low-cost Woosh signal whenever it was available, but would then fall-back to the more expensive but ubiquitous GSM/GPRS signal when necessary.

Package such a phone up into a neat little ergonomic and stylish unit and you'd have a winner.

Unfortunately, such a device would probably bite quite hard into Vodafone's existing cellular market so I can't see it flying any time soon. Then there's the not insignificant problems associated with producing such a phone/modem at an affordable price -- given the small size of the market here in NZ.

Still -- it's a nice dream.

In the meantime, I'd like to hear from anyone using wireless connectivity for their internet activities. How's it working? What kind of value are you getting? Would you still use it if NZ's DSL prices fell into line with overseas rates?

Streaming Content Coming -- But...
I'm just about set up here to start producing a daily audio bulletin that will summarise the Net and tech news into a 2-4 minute bulletin.

However, I need some way of streaming these -- probably using Microsoft's media player as a user client. Unfortunately, my servers are all BSD-based and, in the interests of pragmatism, I'd like to know if anyone has a server capable of streaming WMA to the local Aardvark audience, that they could make space/bandwidth available on.

Naturally you'd get the well-deserved plug you'd deserve if you were able to help.

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