"These types of initiatives are excellent for raising awareness of and supporting mobile wireless," he said.

"[In fact] this type of application or protocol sounds like something iBurst could handle and now that iBurst has been ratified as a standard by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), that gives us even more scope. So unless there are any aspects of the protocol that I am not aware of, we would be happy to discuss it further with the developers," he said.

Unwired CTO, Eric Hamilton, was similarly optimistic.

"I think it is a neat idea, because it makes best use of resources that are around, rather than having, say 20 people connect to the same location by different means. It is using the spectrum to best effect. At the end of the day customers can always choose which mechanism of connection to use anyway, so it just gives them another option. Competition is always good," he said.

In addition to competition it creates cooperation, he said.

"The probabilities are very high that in the future people will have devices that can connect into any number of networks and it may depend on their location, or on the type of content they want to send or receive, or it may depend on their own personal preferences."