Cell phones connected to Wifi will be the final destination for VoIP in the home.
This is the second part of our discussion of The Future of VoIP.

This holiday shopping season as I was looking for a cell phone to gift, I noticed that hardware vendors like Samsung, LG, HTC, and Nokia are making touch-screen PDA phones and some are beginning to standardize around OS’s like the Android Mobile Stack. Even Motorola has started making phones like the ROKR on its new Linux-based operating system and, of course, the Apple App Store has surpassed any analyst’s wildest expectations for usage and adoption.

While selling home-based VoIP service through an ATA (Analog Terminal Adaptor – the box that connects the traditional phone port to your computer) was the first obvious stage for VoIP, we are seeing a common trend amongst those who get unlimited or all-you-can-eat wireless plans through their cellular carrier – they stop using any land-line based phone. With the exception of making international calls, increasingly people use their cell phones at home.

Along with this trend is the rising amount of phones sharing a common open-source operating system where anyone can write an application that uses the Wifi capability in their mobile (or even an iPod Touch) and use an app from VoIP application vendor – bypassing spending time with their wireless provider.

While wireless companies attempt to stop such applications from working on their networks or the phones their networks support, numerous “jail-breaks” exist for many of the more popular PDA-style cell phones. Their increased usage, like it or not, is as inevitable as file sharing music.

In South Korea, broadband and cell phone adoption is incredibly high. If their cellular phone market is any indication, possible indicators show that while the wireless carriers struggle to make money off of selling raw minutes and data (a phenomenon not seen by US Carriers yet), they do profit by creating “value-added network services” such as games for teens, cell phone coupons and wireless payments for busy professionals. There are numerous apps any South Korean teen can now download onto their phones that allow them to connect to their home Wifi and conduct VoIP calls over their cell phone.

Which means the U.S. can’t be very far behind. Expect to see people “making cheap calls on their cell phones” at home as the U.S. carriers begin to gradually increase pricing on overall ‘Family Plan’ packages in a tight economy.