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Calypso Wireless wins Frost and Sullivan Award, hires new CTO

The plan to make Calypso Wireless famous hinged on creating a phone which worked well on WiFi and on GSM - and this was supposed to be the basis of a low-cost Chinese mobile network. When that didn't happen, many people said that Calypso was doomed. But it appears not...

Today's news is that Akshay Sharma, ex Siemens Chief Architect, has joined Calypso as CTO. Sharma is a more than competent operator - his past credits include "being instrumental in Siemens" (to quote the Calypso press release) "putting together the largest UMTS IMS solution in the world with Cingular and BellSouth - but he's not a superstar whose arrival means instant credibility.

What will help credibility is the Frost and Sullivan "WiFi Technology of the Year award" - in the same area as BT's "Fusion" (originally Bluephone) is striving to establish itself.

ASNAP, or Automatic Switching of Network Access Points, was actually giving a patent back in February 2004 - some months after it was announced that China Telecom was going to build its converged dual-mode network with Calypso technology.

That announcement was taken more seriously by China Mobile's rivals than by anybody in the US or Europe, where generally speaking observers simply didn't believe it. Even the earlier announcement of a successful trial with T-Mobile in Miami left VoIP experts cold. At that time, WiFi phones were incapable of running for long periods on batteries in cellular phones.

Today, Calypso has a phone which looks a lot smaller and neater than most WiFi phones and several of its rivals have struggled to achieve any better credibility.

However, the crunch will come if, or when, Calypso attempts to enforce its patent, which covers the seamless roaming of voice, video and data between WAN access points and short-range APs like WiFi and Bluetooth.