Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times gives a great overview of T-Mobile USA's plans to essentially recreate the Vonage business model with its brand new Talk Forever Home Phone.
T-Mobile provides you with a router with an analog phone jack - an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA) that connects to your home's Broadband Internet Access.
What's interesting is that it's $10/month as long as you have a (mobile) T-Mobile service plan of at least $39/month.
Dudley says something interesting... that "T-Mobile believes it can lure customers with its quality of service and pricing..." Riiiggghhhttt... What "quality of service" over a home Broadband Internet Access connection??? As a long time Vonage user, with a router that claimed (but didn't prove out) that if you put the router inline as the primary Internet router, it would insure Quality Of Service (QOS) for the Vonage calls I can tell you that there is no real quality of service for home VOIP Tellephony. The only thing that does work is having enough overall Broadband Internet Access capacity - like the high-end cable modem or Verizon FIOS fiber services that there's plenty of capacity for both ordinary Internet activities and the VOIP Telephony. But on DSL or Broadband Wireless Internet Access (I'm using Clearwire now) it generally doesn't work, because there's no way to control the flow of packets to give guaranteed capacity to the VOIP Telephony.
Interestingly, the Talk Forever At Home is separate from T-Mobile's earlier Hotspot@Home service that uses a special Wi-Fi router and special T-Mobile mobile phones that have Wi-Fi built in that routes your wireless phone's calls over the Wi-Fi and your home Broadband Internet Access connection instead of on T-Mobile's wireless voice network.
If they were to combine the two so that you have the option of using either conventional handsets and/or your mobile phone, and the phones you put in each room were two line phones... nah... too advanced, too convenient.
By Steve Stroh
This article is Copyright © 2008 by Steve Stroh except for specifically-marked excerpts. Excerpts and links are expressly permitted (and encouraged).
This article was written and posted via Broadband Wireless Internet Access (BWIA); Clearwire service using a NextNet Wireless / Motorola Expedience Residential Service Unit (RSU).
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