The glue Sky Dayton will use to stitch together a network is called Unlicensed Mobile Access.
UMA is a set of specifications allowing roaming between WiFi and cellular networks. (JoeJava showed me how it works.)
The problem for Dayton is that the current specification only works with GSM and GPRS networks. Dayton's two cellular partners use a competing system, CDMA.
Qualcomm, which created CDMA, should now be under enormous pressure to do something like UMA. How much you want to bet they announce that something very, very soon?
There are already products out there to do this. The same people who joined UMA have CDMA versions of the same stuff. The big holdup in this area is still the lack of hybrid mobiles. The handset vendors are in such an incestuous relationship with the licensed carriers, I don't know who will have the guts to pull the trigger. It reminds me of hybrid cars. There were working prototypes in 1992, but when was the real consumer model available, 2000? And the first really appealing hybrid cars weren't available until 2002. I'm praying for the hybrid mobile, but I'm not sure we'll see it for another 3 years.
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