Mobile Workers Travel in Packs?Mobile Workers Travel in Packs?

The new Verizon iPhone offers another way to connect multiple people to a single cellular connection.

One not-previous-speculated-upon aspect of today's Verizon/CDMA iPhone announcement is the ability to connect up to five devices to the iPhone via WiFi, so the devices can share a 3G connection. On a similar note, I remarked on the somewhat-unusual conference phone that Avaya picked up when it acquired Konftel a week ago: A traditional-looking conference set that has a SIM card for cellular connection.

It leads me to wonder: Is this a significant use case, or at least a meaningful niche: Multiple people needing to share a single connection to a cellular network, presumably because a hard-wired or a WiFi Ethernet connection are unavailable?

Right now, people use their cell phones in corporate and home offices that are also equipped with wireline telephony and Internet. It's hard to imagine that, in places where those options remain available, anyone would choose to connect multiple users into the cellular network instead. You use your cell phone while in the office because it's a personal call or because a business associate, for whatever reason, has chosen to call you on that line. That dynamic wouldn't seem to apply to the scenario of multiple people sharing the use of a cellular connection--unless, of course, the shared wireline networks were all down.

Another possibility is that this is really setting the table for 4G, and for a world where wireless broadband may actually start replacing wired. Though it's hard to imagine how that could be more economical, especially with the assumption that 4G connections aren't going to be flat fee/unlimited-usage.

So, ad hoc conferencing goes on the road. Is that what this is about?