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T-Mobile Announces WiFi Meshing Cellphone
tregetour writes with a link to a New York Times article penned by David Pogue about a quiet announcement last week by T-Mobile. It has nothing to do with the iPhone, but it could still be a welcome revolution for users plagued by high cellphone bills. "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." He goes on to explain further benefits of the system, and describes the wireless routers that the company will be pushing with the service. The only thing missing: an estimate of when it will hit stores.
How about last week... when it actually hit stores? Anyway, it's just too bad that existing phones with WiFi like the Dash don't support this.
Here's a link to their promo site http://www.theonlyphoneyouneed.com/
Funnypics
Nokia launched the 6136 last Feb (2006) in Europe:8 5,39252128,00.htm
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,10000000
This does the roaming wifi/GSM stuff as well.
Tested in Oulu, Finland in 2006:
http://www.mobiledia.com/news/49241.html
Anybody know how those tests have gone, what the take up is?
The word "mesh" isn't mentioned once in TFA. The article's poster or possibly editor made up this word in the title. Go Slashdot!
Umm.. You still use tmobiles network. The call doesn't magically travel across the country and terminate at another phone.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Most coffee shop deployments will not die on bandwith. They will die on packet rates. One VOIP call is 100 packets per second. 8 calls are 800. While the nominal rate of most devices used for APs should in theory allow 10+ times more than that, in reality they will die NAT-ing the traffic. 3-4 calls at most is what they can handle without excessively jittering the flows. 8+ calls is likely to kill most APs with built in NAT outright. 8 calls assuming IPSEC in UDP NAT traversal and AMR internally is around some measly 320Kbit. So packet rates start killing this long before bandwidth is of any concern.
While there are few of these phones, they will be great. If they really get market penetration its own popularity will kill it or make it useless as it will be switching to GSM/3G all the time due to detected congestion on the WiFi. From there on there will be endless billing nightmares as consumers will insist that they called over WiFi while the call really was routed over cellular and so on and so fourth.
It will be fun to watch. From the sidelines. Thanks god I am no longer in this business.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
ECH... once more with formating.
;) One of the major advantages of this over a normal wi-fi phone, is that it will hand over between GSM and Wi-Fi and maintain the call. No other Wi-Fi call provider can offer that at this time (AFAIK).
Let me preface the rest by stating I work in T-Mobiles Operations and Engineering Department, and helped alpha test this device. =)
When making a Wi-Fi call, the handset creates a GSM tunnel allowing it to maintain the same security used on any normal cellular call you make. So if you're still afraid of people tapping your calls, I recommend that you don't use a cell phone at all.
No releasing it at the same time as the iphone doesn't seem like the best bet, however I'm not in marketing
If you buy the phone but not the service, you can still use Wi-Fi but it will use your minutes as normal, the feature just give you unlimited Wi-Fi calls.
Will it make calls for T-Mobile cheaper to process? Maybe if enough people start picking it up, but there was an investment in time and added hardware to the network that would need to be paid off first. But in the long run, yes t-mobile should save money as people route calls over IP, however, this savings is passed on to the customer in that they can make all the calls they want for $10 a month. (It's up to the customer to decide if they will use it enough to warrant that cost)
Working for T-Mo I think this feature is great, but my opinion is of course biased.
Which would probably be totally true HAD THE ARTICLE NOT SPECIFICALLY STATED that you could use your phone FREE at Starbucks T-Mobile hotspots!
The correct term is "unmetered." The minutes as such are free. The service is $10.
I use this Hotspot@Home service and find it fantastic! T-mobile already offers the best customer service, now I have a cell tower in my bedroom...and free wifi roaming while overseas.
The Good
-WiFi call quality better than GSM
-WiFi-GSM hand-offs work well
-No minutes charged for calls started on WiFi and finished on GSM
The Bad
-Will not work with hotspots that require a web log-in (aside from T-mobile USA Hotspots)
-The bundled router does not support Mac OS X (to register you need to run a Windows-only application from a CD)
The Ugly
-The service currently works with only 2 very basic phones that even lack a web browser...even though high end devices like the Dash have wifi chipsets
"...What is good for General Motors is good for America." -Charles Wilson, Secretary of Defense and fmr President of GM
T-Mobile's GSM/WiFi phones do not use SIP when they are on WiFi. Instead, they
use a tunneling mechanism to tunnel back to the operator's core, and connect
to their GSM MSC instead through translation layer called UMA (Universal
Mobile Access).
GSM/UMTS has this concept of non-access-stratum
signaling, which consists of messages that are tunneled between the MSC
and the phone, which are completely transparent to the underlying
transport technology. (BTW, the presense of these layers is partially
what makes UMTS/GSM signaling so complicated, especially compared to
competing equivalent technologies like CDMA).
So you are absolutely not offloading the operator's core network. You
are offloading the RF network and the towers, however, which is why
you get some price break.
Magnus.
They have two phones - the Samsung t409 and the Nokia 6086 (Both UMA capable)
and two routers - a Linksys WRT-54 and a Netgear (I did not catch the model #).
It's an add-on to your normal cell phone subscription, for only $9.99 per month for a single line, and $19.99 per month for up to five lines on a FamilyTime plan. Whenever the phone places the call over Wi-Fi, it does not count toward your minutes. Whenever it's placed over the GSM network, it does.
The service can be used with any Wi-Fi router. However theirs makes it easier to secure. Also, you can use the phones at any of their Hotspot locations over their Wi-Fi without having to sign up to a HotSpot account.
Once you start a call using Wi-Fi/UMA, the call does not count toward your minutes - even if you hand-over to the GSM network. It sounds like it will work well at school or at home.
I don't think Net Neutrality is an issue since UMA uses a IPSec tunnel, the broadband carrier cannot inspect packets and tell what is being sent over the tunnel. If they did not allow IPSec traffic, then VPNs would quit working. VPNs allow people to access their work e-mails from home. Broadband providers can't effectively stop traffic over IPSec tunnels.