The New York Times (reg) has picked up on the notion that mobile phones will soon have Wi-Fi access and combined that with the perennial newspaper favorite of ?wardrivers stealing YOUR bandwidth? to suggest that there will soon be problems with people with Wi-Fi enabled mobile phones using other people?s open networks to make calls. While this is just an extension of debate about laptop users piggy-backing on open Wi-Fi access points, it will be a lot easier to use a phone in these situations (rather than a laptop) and a lot harder to detect.

Roger Entner, an analyst at Ovum Research, suggested that the Wi-Fi phones will be a PR success for telcos because of all the dropped calls. ?Everybody who tries a Wi-Fi phone will get down on their knees and thank the wireless phone people for the good job they?ve done on coverage,? he said.?