T-Mobile Service Ties Cellphones to Home, With Some Sacrifices
February 28, 2008
by Walter S. Mossberg
The poor landline home phone is getting less and less respect. Increasing numbers of people don’t even have traditional landline phone service anymore. These folks prefer to rely on their cellphones, which can be cheaper to use and carry a number that travels with a person instead of being locked to a house.
Many others keep their landline-phone service grudgingly, only because it is needed for things like fax machines. But even they often use their cellphones at home, because their friends and family members dial their cellphone number routinely, and their personal phone books are inside their cellphones.
But there is a big drawback to using a cellphone at home, especially in a large house: You have to schlep it around with you from room to room. By contrast, landline phone service can be used via either cordless or corded extension phones. Now, T-Mobile, one of the big U.S. cellphone companies, is rolling out a new system that it hopes will make cellphone service at home more convenient and even cheaper to use.
The service, being introduced this month in two test cities, Seattle and Dallas, allows you to use a cellphone account with any corded or cordless home phone, with multiple extensions, for just $10 a month. That very low price gets you unlimited domestic calls.
This new T-Mobile service, tentatively called Talk Forever Home Phone, is likely to be available nationally in a few months. It works via a special Wi-Fi wireless router that you must buy, with a two-year contract, for a one-time charge of $50. The router, which can either replace or supplement your existing wireless router, is essentially a stationary cellphone that marries an in-home Wi-Fi network to the T-Mobile cellphone network.
I have been testing the new system and found that it worked well, and it was extremely simple to set up and use. For my tests, I used a cordless phone supplied by T-Mobile, which included a base station and one extension handset. I was able to make and receive calls all over my home in exactly the same manner, and with exactly the same quality, as I do with my normal cordless landline service.
While T-Mobile is selling this cordless phone as a $60 option, it isn’t necessary for use with the new $10 service. The only new hardware that is required is the special Wi-Fi router.
However, there are some significant downsides to the new T-Mobile service that might make people think twice about dumping their landlines. For one thing, it doesn’t work with fax machines, home-security systems and other devices that rely on dial-up modems. Also, unlike landline phones, it doesn’t automatically transmit your home address to 911 emergency centers. You have to manually supply that address to T-Mobile during signup, and the company then sends it to your local emergency center.
Another downside: You must be a T-Mobile cellphone customer to buy and use this $10 monthly home service, and your T-Mobile plan must either be an individual plan costing at least $40 a month or a family plan costing at least $50 a month.
Finally, while you can transfer your current landline phone number to this new service, it cannot share your existing T-Mobile cellphone number. So people who are used to calling you on your cellphone will still do so, and you will still have to race for the cellphone or carry it around to receive those calls. You also can’t transfer your cellphone’s address book to the new home phone.
The special router is made by Linksys and looks very much like a typical Linksys router, except for the fact that it has two standard telephone jacks in the back and slots inside for T-Mobile SIM cards, the same kind that are inside a T-Mobile cellphone.
You can use the special router as a replacement for your current Wi-Fi router, but I just plugged it into an existing port on my old router, inserted the SIM card, and then plugged the cordless-phone base station into one of the phone jacks. It worked immediately, and didn’t affect or degrade my existing Internet service.
In addition to enabling the phone service around my house, the router was also usable by my computers for Internet connectivity, though it doesn’t support the new, fast “n” flavor of Wi-Fi.
This new system is not a so-called voice-over-Internet-protocol phone system, such as Vonage. It doesn’t carry your phone calls wholly over the Internet, but merely uses the Internet to get them to the T-Mobile cellphone network, which then carries the calls as if they had been made on a cellphone.
T-Mobile says the system will work fine even if you don’t have T-Mobile cellphone coverage at your house, because the call doesn’t rely on the cellphone network for its first leg and only is routed to the cell network once it reaches a T-Mobile switching center.
If you are a T-Mobile customer and can live with this system’s drawbacks, the $10 monthly fee may be hard to resist. But this new system is far from a perfect replacement for landline phones.
- Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.
Comments
I had to laugh at this:
“But there is a big drawback to using a cellphone at home, especially in a large house: You have to schlep it around with you from room to room.”
What has the world come to? Gee, those phones are heavy
(and, how is this different from a cordless?)
– As far as history goes, wasn’t the phone originally a novelty where most people believed there would be one phone per town?
We are so spoiled…
Posted by brad fuller at February 28th, 2008 at 11:26 am“This new system is not a so-called voice-over-Internet-protocol phone system, such as Vonage.”
Really? Just like a Vonage service, the call uses VoIP to get the call from the subscriber to a more traditional phone network. Sure, T-Mobile uses UMA while Vonage uses SIP, both both services are most definitely VoIP services. More details at http://ikeelliott.typepad.com/.....es-ne.html
Posted by Ike Elliott at March 1st, 2008 at 9:18 pmI dropped my land line years ago when the price started going over $ 80 per month just for local calls. And the service really sucked.
Now I use Vonnage, get great service, unlimited calls and long distance and overseas calls are cheap. All for $ 25 per month. My cell phones (family plan) work for on the road and when someone is yacking on the main number.
en
Posted by elder norm at March 2nd, 2008 at 8:36 pmMy local service with SBC is $16.95. They’re going to have to give me a great deal to give up the benefits of that cheap local service.
I would like to drop it, because that much for 911 service and maybe three calls a week – two of which are not welcome – is kind of a waste of money.
I’m dumping T-Mobile later this year to get an iPhone. I guess I’ll be stuck with whatever AT&T offers.
Posted by Eric Welch at March 3rd, 2008 at 8:21 amInteresting technology article, but T-Mobile must have missed the invention of Bluetooth. I purchased a Bluetooth enabled VTECH phone system that allows me to answer mobile calls from any cordless extension in my home via Bluetooth. Each cell phone paired to the base has a unique ring tone and setup is easy. Sure the price of entry for a base station and seven extensions may be high but for ease of use what a good balance.
Posted by Harold Hart at March 5th, 2008 at 7:59 amBe afraid, be very afraid. I signed up for this service in July, 2008. It appeared to work alright w/ some outages until January, 2009 when it was down for minutes, hours, days. When the problem occurs it requires you to reset your router each and every time. It was so bad I had to set up a surge protector under my desk, so I could simply use my foot to turn the router on and off, on and off, on and off…. When I called to complain, t-mobile told me they were not aware of this problem, well to be frank they are liars. There are postings all over the place, including their own forum on how unreliable this service really is.
Posted by Dot Meehan at May 28th, 2009 at 3:32 pmThey sent me a new router, knowing full well this wouldn’t solve the problem – the problem was I believed them. Why wouldn’t I, I had VOIP for years from other providers with no real problems. Well – same problems. You are on the phone and all of sudden the person on the other end cannot hear you – reset the router. You call them back or they call you and it drops again – reset the router. You do it a few more times – same thing. Like I said it may be minutes but more likely hours and in the end days at a time. It also takes your internet service with it. Linksys forum also has many postings, look up “no blue light”.
So I call again – told my case was closed – really, no one called to see if it was working. Told you have to start at the lower level customer service all over again. Email CEO, get call from executive response team. Now they are angry, combative, abusive and threatening – yes, threatening to “investigate” my phone calls or how I use my phone – I told them – have at it. Their executive response person Beckett spoke over me continually – actually yelling at me. I told her I did not want any more contact with her – find someone else. Oh – did I mention she thought it was funny I had this kind of phone service. Even though the phone continually disconnected while I was speaking with her – she tried to claim it wasn’t their problem and they still expected me to pay the bill. Anyway, Beckett had the audacity to keep calling me and I told her emphatically not to call. She said she would continue to call – oh, really – had to inform her this was harassment in writing. Then someone else called but the call kept dropping and they didn’t call back.
Senior tech Kevin calls and told me he had the same issue, but it wasn’t as bad these days – not as bad – are you kidding me! He was supposed to come to me and bring a new router – well he never showed up. Then a letter from t-mobile they are terminating my service and keeping my activation fees, the money for phones and equipment, but we still want you to pay the balance on your bill or we won’t release your number. Keep in mind I paid all along, believing they were honestly attempting to fix the problem – because they said so – like I said – LIARS. In April when the service became unbearable, leaving me without my internet service – I told them I would pay when they fixed the problem – therefore I was disputing my bill. American consumers have to stop being doormats – we have let this happen. Not me – not anymore. I reported them to the FCC, BBB, AG and small claims. An important fact is that you cannot call 911 should you need to when you have no service or it disconnects every minute. Well at least that would get the cops here, since they would figure we were making prank calls to 911. Totally disgraceful company.