T-Mobile Service Ties Cellphones to Home, With Some Sacrifices

March 3, 2008 — -- The poor landline home phone is getting less and less respect. Increasing numbers of people don't even have traditional landline phone service anymore. These folks prefer to rely on their cellphones, which can be cheaper to use and carry a number that travels with a person instead of being locked to a house.

Many others keep their landline-phone service grudgingly, only because it is needed for things like fax machines. But even they often use their cellphones at home, because their friends and family members dial their cellphone number routinely, and their personal phone books are inside their cellphones.

But there is a big drawback to using a cellphone at home, especially in a large house: You have to schlep it around with you from room to room. By contrast, landline phone service can be used via either cordless or corded extension phones. Now, T-Mobile (DT), one of the big U.S. cellphone companies, is rolling out a new system that it hopes will make cellphone service at home more convenient and even cheaper to use.

The service, being introduced this month in two test cities, Seattle and Dallas, allows you to use a cellphone account with any corded or cordless home phone, with multiple extensions, for just $10 a month. That very low price gets you unlimited domestic calls.

This new T-Mobile service, tentatively called Talk Forever Home Phone, is likely to be available nationally in a few months. It works via a special Wi-Fi wireless router that you must buy, with a two-year contract, for a one-time charge of $50. The router, which can either replace or supplement your existing wireless router, is essentially a stationary cellphone that marries an in-home Wi-Fi network to the T-Mobile cellphone network.

I have been testing the new system and found that it worked well, and it was extremely simple to set up and use. For my tests, I used a cordless phone supplied by T-Mobile, which included a base station and one extension handset. I was able to make and receive calls all over my home in exactly the same manner, and with exactly the same quality, as I do with my normal cordless landline service.