British pigopolists and customer value.

British Telecom finally has finally unveiled its Bluephone service: A mobile phone that uses an IP connection to provide landline-rates calls when you're at home. Awesome! Until you read the fineprint, of course.

• Your IP connectivity must in fact be a BT broadband link. No third parties at this party, no sir. And mobile connectivity is through Vodaphone only.
  
• You'll be charged the normal landline tariffs for outgoing calls from home (even though you're already providing and paying for the IP link).
• You're being billed the tariff relevant to the situation your started the call in. The call can switch, the billing won't.
  
• People calling you will be charged the to-mobile tariff, regardless of where you are. If you're at home they end up paying a premium to reach an IP-phone.
  

So BT is in fact double charging both you and people calling you: providing cutomer value indeed. And the best part is that when this fails you can be sure they'll blame it on something fancy like lack of cutomer confidence for new-gen communications, while their ex-customers happily keep yapping into their Skype headsets.
Addind insult to injury they have proved that voice over bluetooth can work, and so can seamless network hopping. How long until someone comes up with a smart Skype gateway? Then you just plug a BT dongle in your desktop, and off you go.
Linky-linky:
James Enck explains in numbers why it's doomed.
Martin Geddes also has an interesting commentary on value.
The Register syndicates an article from newswireless.net pointing out an extra couple of technical shortcomings and billing insanities that I didn't know about, the best one being the ability of the base station to do Wifi, but not for placing calls. This effectively turns your lovely mobile phone into a wireless device with a range inferior to the average phone cable.