June 27, 2007
T-Mobile makes home a hotspot for its phones
T-Mobile has become the first US wireless carrier to offer a wi-fi option for users to replace their landlines, but, like other operators around the world, it is not handing its calls completely over to the internet.
T-Mobile launches Hotspot @ Home today with two new “Hotspot” cellphones from Samsung and Nokia and calling plans that allow unlimited nationwide calls over wi-fi at home or any open wi-fi hotspot for as low as $9.99 a month initially.
This would be in addition to a regular calling plan, but T-Mobile points out the savings could still be substantial if consumers are spending the industry average of $48 a month on their landline at home and can now replace it.
Of course, they could anyway with their regular cellphones, without the need for the new service, but T-Mobile says poor reception at home is the biggest barrier to landline replacement.
The new phones solve this by using the home internet connection to improve the GSM mobile experience. Calls made in the home are not like Voice-over-Internet Protocol Skype calls, but are instead GSM calls wrapped in IP.
This allows mobile carriers to maintain their billing systems on calls and ensure a reliable hand-off to the cellular system if someone walks out of their house or hotspot and carries on a conversation.
The UMA (unlicensed mobile access) technology has been used successfully by operators including Orange, BT and Telecom Italia in Europe. T-Mobile is the natural operator to launch it first in the US – it has set up a nationwide network of 8,500 wi-fi hotspots and it has no landline business here it could risk cannibalising.
The company is also offering a wireless router, free after a mail-in rebate, that will give better voice quality and prioritise voice traffic over data traffic, as well as improving the battery life of the phones.
One disappointment – you can’t surf for free to your heart’s content on the new wi-fi phones. Talk is cheap, but anything else requires a separate data plan.
UPDATE. Michael Gartenberg, Jupiter Research analyst, has a full review of the service here.
