T-Mobile HotSpot at Home: Mobile Innovation Award Winner 2007

Now there’s officially no excuse not to make your cell phone your only phone. By turning your Wi-Fi router into an in-home cell tower, T-Mobile HotSpot at Home finally puts an end to indoor dead spots. The service uses a new technology called Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA), which allows a growing fleet of hybrid Wi-Fi HotSpot phones to piggyback on your local Wi-Fi network (or any of T-Mobile’s 8,500 public hotspots) for landline-like call quality, even if you’re in a bar-less basement. Even better, because the plan costs only $19.99 per month, you can finally retire that dusty old landline.
 

Although the first phones compatible with HotSpot @Home were less-than-thrilling clamshells, this service got a major boost when T-Mobile launched a BlackBerry compatible with the service. The carrier offers a couple 802.11g routers (free with rebate) that are optimized for HotSpot @Home in that they prioritize voice over data traffic and offer longer talk time via Wi-Fi. But we had no problems using our BlackBerry Curve 8320 with a Linksys 802.11n router.
 

Not only does HotSpot @Home deliver excellent call quality and coverage, but it also does an admirable (if sometimes uneven) job of automatically switching your call from GSM to Wi-Fi, and vice versa. Say you’re in the middle of gabbing with your mom while you’re on your way out the door; you should be able to keep on gabbing without hearing a single click as you pull out of the driveway. And if you’re in the middle of a call and decide to stop into a Starbucks, the underlying UMA technology will seamlessly execute the hand-off to Wi-Fi in less than a minute.
 

So even though it’s called HotSpot @Home, this new breed of calling service is just as compelling for road warriors as it is for cutting costs (and the cord) at home.