Shame Ionica peaked 5 years too early, their technology would be perfect for this kind of thing.
Are you sure it would ?
Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but I'm pretty sure that
regarding
data throughput Ionica's ill fated network was not capable of much more
than
a regular PSTN line, anyway from memory network coverage was nearly as
bad as
ADSL.
Absolutely correct. Ionica launched back in the mid 1990s, when I was tech ed of Network Week. From day one we were basically writing things like "Neat idea, but the guy running it sounds like a cowboy and they've forgotten to do any marketing".
When we asked Ionica whether we could have anything more than a phone line - ISDN, for instance - the answer was always that the current equipment, running in the current radio spectrum (2.4GHz, I believe it was), couldn't handle it but when the new version came out (11GHz or so, if memory serves) we could have anything we wanted. To say that you can't do 128Kbit/sec ISDN in a 2.4GHz spectrum is, of course, nonsense - if nothing else you could mux it like cellular providers do with multiples of 9.6Kbit/sec channels in GPRS. It may have been fair to say that the kit wasn't up to it, but I can't imagine the equipment vendors didn't have an upgrade roadmap.
Interestingly, the Ionica service - where it was available - was excellent by all accounts. You could have multiple numbers with a different ring pattern for each (so dad could have a different ring pattern from mum), caller ID, a 1471 equivalent, and so on - they did all of this long before BT. And the coverage area was okay, if not massive. From what I can see, they just didn't spend the marketing bucks, and got a reputation in the press for being a bunch of wide boys trying to take investors for a ride.
In fact there's still an Ionica receiver dish on a house up the road from me - maybe they're hoping the service will come back one day!!
Regards,
Dave C