WiFi Calling – The biggest reason I am staying with T-Mobile
It is pretty obvious that T-Mobile is a fourth-string carrier here in the United States. They were pretty late to the 3G game and while now with their HSPA+ network they have the fastest network currently in wide availability in the US they still have a long way to go to even catch up with Sprint.
That said, around 3 years ago I left Sprint (after 7 years) and went over to the magenta side. I started traveling internationally and wanted a GSM phone and so, firmly remembering my hatred for Cingulair wireless (now AT&T) I went to the only provider at the time that would enable me to roam almost anywhere. And boy am I lucky that I did.
No other US nation-wide carrier presently supports dual-mode calling (WiFi and Cellular) which is a huge shame as it has been the single best feature of being a T-Mobile customer. Being able to fill the gaps in their coverage with WiFi is wonderful by itself but the true surprise is being able to reduce or even eliminate roaming charges when traveling internationally. I spent two weeks in Australia earlier this summer and while I was there when I could I spent much of my time actually registered on the T-Mobile network via UMA as opposed to roaming on Vodafone AU. This saved me about $80 on my bill versus the previous year when I was in Australia without having a phone capable of WiFi.
I really don’t know why every carrier doesn’t support this, being able to fill the gaps in your network by using unlicensed access technologies sure beats the hell out of the expensive femtocell technology, and the customer benefits of reducing roaming charges is a pretty compelling business case (if you ask me).
As an aside, presently only the BlackBerry and a couple Nokia handsets on T-Mobile support UMA. This is one of the huge reasons I won’t even consider switching to Android at this point.
Tags: blackberry, cellphones, technology
There are a couple of other folks using UMA in the US – one of which is/used to be Cincinnati Bell – but you are right, there seems no consensus to implement non-cellular access for additional access. Perhaps more people should use a ‘red’ colored product that I am working on!
I think the ‘red’ product that we are working on would be great if the company working on it would sell it more places! :)
“I really don’t know why every carrier doesn’t support this,”
my kneejerk is that it’s only a huge economic win for a ~fourth-string carrier. first- and second-string carriers attract consumers in tons of other currently-popular ways. they also *want* people to use their legacy networks because that’s a revenue item for them.
in other words, i’m hypothesizing that there is an inverse relationship between size and success of a carrier against perceived benefit of implementing wifi calling.