T-Mobile Launches WiFi Calling Nationwide

(c) MocoNews

T-Mobile has begun offering its HotSpot @Home service across the US, letting customers use the GSM network when away from home and the WiFi network at home--or a T-Mobile hotspot.

The service launches with two handsets--the Nokia 6086 and the Samsung t409, each costing $50--and will cost $10 per month extra on an individual plan and $19.99 per month extra on family plans. However, calls made on the WiFi network won’t count towards minutes. More importantly for content companies is the much faster (and reliable) download speeds offered by WiFi compared to cellular networks.

Not enough: Of course, the WiFi network is not enough to suddenly launch mobile content usage into the stratosphere. The general paradigm is that most mobile content is used as a time-filler, where someone is waiting for some reason and pulls out their mobile to pass the time... And successful mobile services are often location-based. The upshot is that getting people to download content at home for use later is going to require them to change their behaviour. There’s a need there for applications that download content in the background which can detect when the phone is using WiFi and download news, videos and so on from sites the user generally goes to which they can view later. Of course, this requires memory--the Nokia 6086 only comes with 5 Mb free memory, although it does have an SD slot so a 2Gb card is possible.

The Wall Street Journal has a piece on WiFi-enabled mobile phones in the US, probably precipitated by T-Mobile’s news but noting that Verizon Wireless has trialled the idea as well. Sprint has a smartphone with WiFi (not to mention its proposed WiMAX network), and of course AT&T is just about to launch the iPhone. “By 2011, nearly a quarter of all handsets shipped world-wide will have Wi-Fi, according to ABI Research, up from just 0.2 percent in 2006” notes the WSJ, adding that there are hassles with the technology such that WiFi drains the battery life faster than cellular networks.