Another day, another new mobile phone…

Nokia today revealed a new handset – the snappily titled 6301 – that uses unlicensed mobile access (UMA) technology. That means it allows users to switch from traditional mobile networks to make calls over the internet when they are within reach of a wireless network such as a Wi-Fi hotspot.

This sort of thing – dubbed “fixed-mobile convergence” – has been one of the hottest topics in telecoms for some time now. Certainly since Skype, the online telephony service, made it clear that that extremely cheap web-based calls represent a huge threat to traditional networks, both fixed and mobile.

UMA offers the mobile networks a means of striking back. In the US, for instance, subscribers to T-Mobile can opt to pay $10 a month on top of their normal bills so that when they are at home they can use their domestic Wi-Fi system to patch into the T-Mobile cellular network.

That means the cost of home phone calls is slashed – a more useful weapon for mobile operators than may first be apparent since it is estimated that in Europe 30 to 40 per cent of mobile calls are made within the home. That figure rises as high as 60 per cent in the United States.

But will slightly cheaper home calls be enough to save the mobile operators from the marauding web?

Don’t bet on it.

UMA is especially useful in the US, where traditional cellular coverage is famously patchy – especially inside people’s homes. There, effectively making Wi-Fi hotspots part of an operator’s network makes eminently good sense.

That is less the case, however, in a country like the UK, where mobile coverage, for the most part, is not so bad.

Meanwhile, services such as fring (www.fring.com) already allow users to download a piece of software to many Nokia phones that lets them make internet voice calls using Skype and other Voip (voice over internet protocol) services such as Google Talk, via a Wi-Fi connection.

Fring doesn’t cost anything to download and uses the tag line “the best frings in life are free”.

The mobile operators will probably not agree.

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