It’s called T-Mobile HotSpot @Home, and it’s absolutely ingenious. It could save you hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, and yet enrich T-Mobile at the same time. In the cellphone world, win-win plays like that are extremely rare.
Here’s the basic idea. If you’re willing to pay $10 a month on top of a regular T-Mobile voice plan, you get a special cellphone. When you’re out and about, it works like any other phone; calls eat up your monthly minutes as usual.
But when it’s in a Wi-Fi wireless Internet hot spot, this phone offers a huge bargain: all your calls are free. You use it and dial it the same as always — you still get call hold, caller ID, three-way calling and all the other features — but now your voice is carried by the Internet rather than the cellular airwaves.
These phones hand off your calls from Wi-Fi network to cell network seamlessly and automatically, without a single crackle or pop to punctuate the switch. As you walk out of a hot spot, fewer and fewer Wi-Fi signal bars appear on the screen, until — blink! — the T-Mobile network bars replace them. (The handoff as you move in the opposite direction, from the cell network into a hot spot, is also seamless, but takes slightly longer, about a minute.)
T-Mobile gives you a router for home for free, and the service works at the 8,500 T-Mobile hotspots in places like Starbucks and Borders. Now, as the article admits, T-Mobile's regular network is not exactly the best, and this move is a way for them to avoid the cost of upgrading that network. That undercuts the competitive pressure on Verizon Wireless and the other leading carriers to offer the same thing. Still, this is a good development.
(Via Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing.)
i actually just bought one of those t-mobile @ home phones this week (my old phone broke a couple of days before). it was only $49 and i can finally get cell phone reception at home now
Posted by: upyernoz | July 12, 2007 at 11:32 AM