Morts Musings

My mobile’s dying, it’s not just old, it’s venerable, I’ve been out of contract for maybe 3 years now, but you know how it is; the tariffs not that bad, the phone keeps plodding along, mostly reliably, (which, given that these days some phones seem to be designed to start dying while one is still in contract, is a bit of a technological miracle!) and so there’s no pressing incentive to do all the reasearch which, as a “savvy” consumer, I feel obliged to do before signing up to something as rigid as an 18 month contract.

Still, the phone’s days are surely numbered now, and maybe after Xmas, and after the January tax bill’s paid, I should probably get around to looking for a handset which has buttons that work reliably & which doesn’t have an annoying habit of trying to use a non-existant 3G signal, rather than switch over to good old reliable 2G. That latter is a real annoyance and actually something the phone’s been doing since I got it, why they couldn’t have built in a user option to force the mobile to switch to 2G I don’t know.

Anyway, I digress, I’ve been doing some looking around for what deals are on the market at the moment and one of the ones which I spotted looks almost too good to be true, to the extent that it’s set my cynical “what’s the catch” alarm bells well and truly ringing!
Essentially it seems that a lot of the latest generation of phones are able to use Skype mobile, which allows one to make free calls to other Skype Mobile users. Now from a consumer point of view this looks great; I’ve been using Skype as an IM service for years now, and have always found it to be a reliable, easy to use, app, and from what I’ve heard from friends, who have used it as a cheap alternative for chatting with relatives abroad, Skype’s calls service is just as stable as their IM.
The only catch I can see at the moment is the need for both parties to have Skype enabled phones, which is surely going to become less and less of a restriction as people with older phones upgrade. So, in theory one day we’ll all be making free mobile calls to all our friends, right?
It’s a lovely idea, but it leaves me wondering where the mobile service providers are going to fit into this utopia of free and easy communication? How are they going to make their money? for example there are deals at the moment where pay-as-you-go phones are being offered with free Skype, which, assuming all your friends have done similar, means that once you’ve paid out for the handset you could get away without paying anything for your calls. It’s even possible to buy credits “at very low rates” directly from Skype, for calls to non-Skype phones, so it’s not even as if the mobile service providers would be making their cash there.
Maybe I’m missing something obvious, surely someone at the mobile companies must have thought this business plan through, but I have to be honest, as things are at the moment I’m having trouble seeing how they’re going to make up the revenue they’re surely going to loose as less and less people use their networks for calls.

I saw this piece in the Telegraph and thought it was such an innovative idea that it deserved a mention. It’s clear as the internet, and general tech, revolution continues that mobile phones are set to play an increasingly important part in peoples lives. The net is alive with talk about increased mobile access, and it seems these days that most big companies & organisations either have a mobile site or are furiously trying to get one up and running, lest they loose out to more forward thinking competitors.

''Press 2 if the dog ate your homework...'' Yes, now mobile phones can even provide pay-as-you-go English lessons!

However the move to offer English lessons, via mobile phone, to a whole nation has to get cudos for its originality & ambition, and it’s just what the Bangladeshi organisation BBC Janala aims to do. By getting the Bangladeshi Govt on board, as well as the country’s six major mobile networks, BBC Janala has been able to offer hundreds of 3 minute English lessons for only 4p each; Very cheap you might think, and probably not too expensive even by Bangladeshi standards, although one must bear in mind that the average Bangladeshi has to live on less than £2 a day.

The initiative is particularly significant because, while English remains a major international language of business, over the last few decades the quality of English teaching in the country has dropped noticably, which, along with the school systems high drop out rate, has lead to lower English fluency overall.
It would certainly appear that the service is being well received so far; it’s about two weeks since it launched and already it’s had over half a million calls, as well as ~1000 people signing up to the web site each day! So far things seem to be running smoothly, the only potential problem with the scheme that I can think of is people with pay as you go phones running out of credit half way through a lesson!