Ripples across the pond

I came into contact with California-based WISP NextWeb several months back, just ahead of its merger with SkyPipeline. Yesterday the company announced a VoIP initiative in partnership with Level3, covering 250,000 potential business customers. NextWeb has over 2,000 customers now, and clearly sees the addition of voice to its wireless T1 service offering as an important differentiator. Yesterday two completely different types of readers emailed me almost simultaneously to ask, "Nextel/Flarion/Level3 - can it be far off?" This certainly poses some interesting questions for Europe, particularly in markets like the UK and Germany, where we have IPWireless deployments in place, and also the Netherlands, where Flarion is in trials. We may see some interesting hybrid product offerings coming from some unexpected places.