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.

Great.

[evilpenguin]

Now "I'm in the coffee shop. Where RU?" will take 10000 times the bandwidth it took on ICQ.

So much for Wi-Fi hotspots being useful for telecommuting...

$10/Month?

[TheRaven64]

Seems a little steep for being allowed to run a SIP client on a machine I own.

Also, where does 'meshing' come into this? This isn't a mesh network. If it were, then I could route packets from my phone via half a dozen other random users' phones to a hotspot and not need T-Mobile's network at all much of the time.

Encryption?

[jshriverWVU]

Would hate to work for a fortune 500 company and be talking on this with a co-worker only to have the packets sniffed from some random server in Malaysia on a major pipeline.

Re:Mesh????

[Nos.]

That makes it an endpoint, not a mesh. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_network [wikipedia.org]

Re:Not when, but if...

[guruevi]

So you can sell the "premium" service plan to them. Whether or not you make a call doesn't make a difference for most providers, the infrastructure is the same and has to be running anyway in order for you to get reception.

Yes, calling eats more bandwidth, but not everybody is calling at the same time nor 24/7 so the point is moot. That's how they can sell you unlimited calling/messaging plans at a premium ($5 extra/month).

The same here, whether or not the infrastructure will be used, the equipment and a reserved line has to be there (they will "reserve" bandwidth like most businesses, they can't afford to share all their bandwidth with other customers), the phone and service will come with an extra premium to pay for this though and there won't be 100 callers on a single router anyway, so there's always going to be place enough.

Take me for example, I pay $70 for 2 lines every month, whether I use the thousands-and-thousands of minutes with it or not is besides the point, my monthly costs are $70 no matter what I do with it, the revenue for the provider is the same whether I call or not, they have to power up the lines so I can make a call in the first place, whether or not it transmits data doesn't matter much then.

Re:Why $10 extra?

[HipPriest]

You can. Just get a phone that supports UMA and your WiFi calls just use your minutes. The $10 a month is optional, to get unlimited WiFi calling.

Re:Why $10 extra?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they are a corporation in business to make a profit?

Re:Not when, but if...

[E IS mC(Square)]

Because T-mobil is more customer oriented then other AT&T family? Before anybody starts, I know, a business entity has to make money - but some companies out there do it without sucking their customers to death.

Re:Great.

[CaptainPatent]

Now "I'm in the coffee shop. Where RU?" will take 10000 times the bandwidth it took on ICQ.

So much for Wi-Fi hotspots being useful for telecommuting...

That statement would take approximately 2 seconds to say. cellphones transmit at ~8k/s. Flash adds are bigger in implementation than the resulting 12k phone packet. Additionally, every hot spot I've seen has a high-speed connection of some kind. 15 phones going at the same time would barely make an impact on the overall speed.
Additionally, it's not like we aren't gaining bandwidth every year at a breakneck pace. Sure this may be slightly noticeable at first, but even the slower connections in the very near future will be able to handle a large number of phones.

The thing I'm worried about is the Wi-fi transmitter being a huge battery hog as is the case with most laptops.

Don't be so pessimistic!

[Thail]

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 ;) 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). 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.

Meshing has a plain-English meaning!

[Anthonares]

Good grief, from the number of "this isn't a Mesh" posts, it seems like no one is aware that the word "mesh" has a plain-English meaning. That's the great thing about context. When you read the summary, and then TFA, and you don't see mesh, you should think "Oh, they meant mesh in the sense of joining".

Just because a word has a technical meaning for branding purposes, the plain-English meaning isn't somehow superseded or obsolete.

Re:Why $10 extra?

[MaceyHW]

You pay "extra" because T-Mobile still has to operate a voip server and route your call. But those of us who make lots of calls from an area with wifi coverage can save money by changing to a plan with far fewer minutes and adding the $10 wifi option.

This is an outstanding development if you use your cell as a primary line and you have wifi at home. I hope it delivers as promised!

Provided you dont get arrested for using free wifi

[denis-The-menace]

With people getting arrested for using free WIFI
(http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/23/1 551227)
why would you use this?

Re:I don't see the connection

[Sviams]

Can someone please provide links or info on these competitors and what iPhone "killers" they're supposedly producing? What exactly is it they will be killing?
Reality is that while it's a huge success for Apple in terms of making a big profit (huge profit margin on devices like this), it does not in any way threaten the existing world wide mobile players such as Nokia, Motorola, SEMC etc.
Furthermore, mobile phones are not Apples core business, and entering the market with the aim to become a top handset manufacturer requires a LOT more than putting out one cool albeit heavily locked down PDA, bolting on cell technology and convincing one operator to sell it as a phone.
Personally, I think the greatest long term value for Apple in this whole enterprise is the strengthening of the brand that will hopefully enable them to do better in their core business areas.

The 10% lead the market

[athloi]

As with anything technological, it seems to me, there's a 10% who explore and the rest settle for whatever is convenient and non-threatening. I'm interested in the 10%, because they'll forge the way for the rest............eventually.

Re:old-fashioned

[Lord Bitman]

Phone companies don't want to charge less for bandwidth, consumers don't want to be confronted with the fact that they're currently paying 1 cent per byte for some things.

Unlicensed mobile access, yawn...

[Renaud]

The underlying technology is most likely UMA : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlicensed_Mobile_Acc ess/ [wikipedia.org]
We've had offers based on this in Europe for over a year.

Very roughly speaking, this works by encapsulating GSM over IP+Wi-Fi. This is why handover between the GSM cell network and the Wi-Fi connection is possible at all : AFAIK, the phone still uses all the higher layers of GSM and the operator's usual servers on their GSM network. Your Wi-Fi access point is just another cell tower.

I personally see this technology as the "evil telecom world's" preferred way to add VoIP on a GSM phone (as opposed to the Internet world's plain old good SIP).

I'd much rather use a real GSM + SIP/Wi-Fi phone like my Nokia E65.

VoIP and GSM calls are perfectly integrated together, and using the SIP account associated with my landline (this is with the "Free" ISP in France), I can call and answer my home calls anywhere in the world exactly as if I were sitting in my sofa, and at the same rates, i.e. free for national calls and to around 30 countries