T-Mobile offering home phone service
T-Mobile USA said Thursday it’s testing a new Internet telephony service in Dallas and Seattle that will replace consumers’ wireline home phone service.
Subscribers will be able to connect any regular home telephone to a T-Mobile router that will send calls over the Internet much the same way as services like Vonage operate. The service costs $10 a month plus taxes and fees for unlimited domestic local and long distance calls. But customers also have to be signed up for a T-Mobile wireless service costing at least $39.99 a month. The required router, which also provides access to the Internet, costs $50 after rebates. T-Mobile said existing phone numbers can be ported over to its service.
The company had been rumored to be working on a voice over IP wireless router since this summer when it was discovered that the company had filed plans for the device with the Federal Communications Commission.
T-Mobile, which is the fourth largest cell phone operator in the U.S., is upping the ante as it competes against, AT&T and Verizon Wireless, the No. 1 and No. 2 cell phone operators in the U.S. Aside from having more customers and larger network footprints than T-Mobile, these two operators also offer regular landline phone service to consumers. T-Mobile, which is owned by the German operator Deutsche Telekom, does not own landline infrastructure in the U.S. This makes it difficult for T-Mobile to compete against these players when it comes to bundling services and enticing customers to drop their existing phone service for service with T-Mobile. [Read the rest of this entry…]
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