Slashdot Mirror
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.
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/
Which would probably be totally true HAD THE ARTICLE NOT SPECIFICALLY STATED that you could use your phone FREE at Starbucks T-Mobile hotspots!
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