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Dimitry wrote:

Jun 28, 2007
Wireless

Tags:

Cell tower in your house is now a reality

Today, T-Mobile went nationwide with an interesting service called T-Mobile HotSpot @Home (I guess @Home trademark was up for grabs?). To summarize, this service allows you to use your wireless router to connect to the T-Mobile network.

In other words, it uses Wi-Fi internet to make and receive calls, text messages, et cetera instead of the neighboring cell tower. Pretty cool? Yeah, this is an awesome feature.

For homes in choppy coverage areas, such as mine, this service could be an invaluable solution to bad reception.

Technology

This technology, being fairly new, is currently only available on two T-Mobile phones.

UMA, the telecommunication system that HotSpot @Home is based on, allows seamless switching between cellular network and wireless internet connections.

That’s right, you can start a call while at home, grab your things, hop in the car, pull away and never miss a beat. The only hold-up will be a short audio drop which comes back within a second.

Summary

The service costs a little bit extra, but it allows you to make and receive unlimited calls. Currently, via a promotional offer you can add it for $10 for a single line or $20 for a family plan. When the offer ends, the service will be $10 more.

While I’m not a T-Mobile customer, it’s great to see at least someone in the cellular industry innovating so I give them props for that. For T-Mobile though, this innovation is a necessity as they have the smallest network and thus, more spotty coverage.

Update: Demo video by PhoneScoop is available! Watch it here.

via Yahoo! News

4 Comments

Grant
about 1 year ago

This is really interesting that T-Mobile has come out with this technology. They recently blocked outgoing calls from their network to Truphone (UK) which allows people to make VOIP calls from their cellphone.

To me, this seems somewhat hypocritical…

http://gigaom.com/2007/06/15/tmobile-truphone/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truphone http://www.truphone.com/

Dimitry
about 1 year ago

Grant: Interesting. One thing to consider is that these are the actions of T-Mobile UK whereas the service I described is by T-Mobile USA, so two separate entities really.

I would imagine if something like that happened in the US, it would be ruled as anti-competitive. Perhaps I’m wrong though.

Joel
about 1 year ago

All depends on how technologically aware the Judges and Courts are.

Most judgments I read seem to have a fundamental lack of understanding of technologies and attempt to attribute past decisions with the barest of relevance to make decisions.

Competitive practice amongst large companies on the global scene is rarely wanted. Look at Region Encoding of games and DVDs – classic collusive behaviour designed to limit competition.

GoL
about 1 year ago

T-Mobile is also interesting. I like it.

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