More mobile innovations. This looks like a body blow to fixed telephony in high-income households.
IPhone-Free Cellphone News – New York Times
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.
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1 Comment
Sanjana Hattotuwa
Dear Rohan,
You can already approximate this in Colombo. I have a Nokia E65 that connects to WiFi and UMTS / Edge GSM networks. Using Fring – http://www.fring.com – I call everyone on my Skype, MSN and Yahoo messenger lists whenever I am on a Wifi network and was pleasantly surprised by the VOIP call quality.
Sanjana