Dean Bubley's Disruptive Wireless: Another 11 UK GSM operators (provisionally)

Dean Bubley writes at Disruptive Wireless that "Ofcom's just announced its provisional list of winning bidders for its low-power GSM licences. The UK now has another 11 GSM operators (excluding O2 which already has a normal licence). Ofcom expects to grant the licences officially next week, subject to payment of the licence fees by this Friday." Bubley notes only two companies didn't make the cut - Zynetix and Orange. Here are Bubley's predictions on what will happen:

• the price for making GSM calls when users are not actually "mobile" but nomadic (ie at home/work) will plummet. This has already happened up to a point, but will now accelerate further, especially given other initiatives like dual-mode Fusion-type service launches and (probably) Genion-style HomeZones
• we're going to see businesses exert a much greater level of power over mobile operators. If large enterprises and government bodies have a choice of 16 mobile operators (and probably countless MVNOs), it seems very likely that corporate cellular tariffs will cease to be such a burden on CIOs' telecom budgets.
• it wouldn't surprise me if various other operators around Europe and elsewhere start to do the same thing & instigate low-power GSM regimes themselves
• it'll probably take longer to get things up and running than everyone expects. There will be technical glitches and delays in network rollout, service development and (as always) user experience tuning. For example, does anyone know what happens when a phone's "network selection" menu has 10+ options shown? Were the menus even designed to cope with that many, perhaps scrolling onto another page?
• there will probably be some interesting international-oriented business models emerging here. Clearly, PLDT is going to do something with its Philippine expats, but there are other bits of cleverness that may emerge - maybe using GSM phones to dial-in to VoIP gateways, or perhaps something with innovative roaming arrangements. I have a meeting this afternoon with a roaming specialist firm, so I'll ask them.
• a lot of companies that have been ignoring picocells and femtocells are going to sit up and take notice. I'm expecting to see that type of functionality being integrated into home gateways & bits of enterprise networking
• lots of network security equipment vendors will have to get their act together. Remember the fuss a few years ago when people were plugging "rogue WiFi access points" into enterprise networks & PCs? Welcome to guerilla wireless v2.0 , only this time with cellular.