Hotspot @Home already outdated

We’ve been huge advocates of T-Mobile’s HotSpot @Home service. With the loads and loads of people using only their cell phones, it seems like it was almost a necessity to find a way to facilitate free calling at home. T-Mobile delivered in a big way, offering us unlimited WiFi calling at home for $10 per month. It’s such a shame, then, that Sprint had to go and ruin the fun for the T-Mobile gang. They’ve gone ahead and released their own unlimited home calling service, based on femtocell technology, which we touched on briefly last month.

The basic idea is that you set up a router — shown above — in your home, which then routes all of your home-based calls over a local CDMA channel. As we said in the article last month, this is said to be a better quality service than WiFi, and at the same time it is drains the battery at a slower rate. Plus-plus.

It’s too bad that Sprint was two months behind HotSpot, because this really is a superior technology. It basically installs a cell tower right in your home, giving you top-notch call quality. And because it acts as a cell tower, it takes the onus off of Sprint’s existing towers, which means more call capacity for them.

Oh, and since it doesn’t require any additional technology beyond the Ubicell box, it can be used with any Sprint phone. So you don’t have to go out and buy a new phone — and a crappy one at that — just to use the service.

In theory, this gets a plus-plus rating from us. However, we’re sure problems will crop up soon enough. And when they do, you can be sure to read about them right here at Prepaid Reviews.

[Mobile Magazine]

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