On Aug. 10, T-Mobile USA started a hush-hush trial of a VoIP service. The nation’s fourth-largest wireless service provider will equip customers in states such as Oregon with special VoIP routers that will enable users to make calls from home via a T-Mobile cell phone for a flat monthly rate, according to a message board postings seeking volunteers (recuiting letter) for the trial, BusinessWeek.com has found.
If this trial is successful and is followed by a full-blown rollout, it could open the floodgates on landline-to-wireless migration.
While today some 7% of Americans use their mobile as their primary phone, that number should climb to 40% within 10 years, figures Craig Mathias, president of wireless consultancy Farpoint Group. After all, if you can make calls from your mobile phone for, say, $5 a month—the amount T-Mobile is rumored to be charging during the at-home trial—why would you pay some $30 for a landline?
Today, some 30% of wireless calls are made from users’ homes, according to consultancy Gartner. But because wireless signals can’t always penetrate buildings, these consumers often have to deal with poor call quality and dead spots—problems.
“T-Mobile is interested in the replacement or displacement of landline minutes,” a T-Mobile spokesperson, who declined to discuss unannounced products, wrote in an e-mail.
This T-Mobile-At-Home service could emerge as the wireless company’s trump card to get its subscriber numbers growing again. On Aug. 10, T-Mobile, a unit of Deutsche Telekom (DT), said it only added 613,000 new customers in the quarter, vs. 972,000 in the year-ago period, in part because it switched to longer, two-year contracts.
T-Mobile and other wireless carriers are also facing slower growth as they approach market saturation. With about 80% of Americans using cell phones already, adding new services, such as at-home offerings, can help attract new customers but also help hold on to old ones.
Indeed, T-Mobile is not the only telco pushing into at-home wireless services. Already, AT&T (T) expects to introduce two new at-home offerings in the coming months.
And where converged services are concerned, at-home offerings are near the top of telcos’ to-do lists. Fact is, more Americans may be interested in a T-Mobile-like at-home service than in such overhyped offerings as mobile TV.
Initial adopters may be offered a choice of handsets in addition to the already revealed Samsung T709 (right), Nokia 6136, LG CL400 and many smartphones support UMA. T-Mobile phones also include smartphones like the T-Mobile MDA ($299) with WiFi and a mini SD slot.
In Britain, BT offers BT Fusion, which allows the telco’s wireless customers to make calls through their broadband connections while at home at low rates. BT has been signing about 2,000 new subscribers for the service a week.
In late 2006 or early 2007, AT&T plans to introduce two offerings that could be used for cheaper at-home wireless calling. One is a dual-mode wireless phone, allowing users to make cellular calls as well as calls over a home or corporate Wi-Fi network. The service is expected to be similar to BT Fusion.
As more emerging carriers, using wireless broadband technologies such as WiMax, enter the market in the coming months with low-priced offerings, having better features like these at-home add-ons could allow the incumbents to hold off on cutting prices.
One telco this at-home migration could leave in a lurch is Verizon. Chances are, if other telcos roll out at-home services, Verizon, whose number of switched access lines declined 7.4%, to 47 million, over the past year, will have to follow suit.
Problem is, a Verizon at-home service could, potentially, result in customers switching from its residential lines to Verizon Wireless service, which it operates jointly with Vodafone (VOD), meaning it would see only a partial benefit from such a shift. For now, Verizon has no plan for such a service, says a company spokesperson.
T-Mobile could have Fixed/Mobile Convergence (FMC) services that use the unlicensed mobile access (UMA) specification ready as early as the fall, according to Roger Entner, VP of Wireless Telecoms at analyst firm Ovum Ltd.
“They have basically finished the upgrades to their APs, they’re waiting for the handsets,” Entner tells Unstrung. “They could launch in the Fall.”
“It’s clear that T-Mobile US is gearing up for a launch soon,” agrees Steve Shaw, director of marketing at UMA pioneer Kineto Wireless, in an email to Unstrung.
VoiceCon Fall bringing together a cross section of industry leaders and start-ups, will be held August 21-24, 2006 at the Moscone North Convention Center in San Francisco.
Conceived by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), IMS is an architecture that essentially takes the place of the control infrastructure in the traditional circuit-switched telephone network, separating services from the underlying networks that carry them.
It uses SIP as its signaling method for setting up calls and handling data sessions, and enables services such as text messaging, voice mail and file sharing to reside on application servers Relevant Products/Services from HP anywhere and be delivered by multiple wired and wireless service providers.
Verizon’s Advances to IMS, or A-IMS — is intended to facilitate improved support for non-Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) devices, applications and services, end-to-end security and wireless VoIP QoS.
But A-IMS lacks the participation of Verizon rivals like Cingular, Sprint Nextel, and Vodafone. Cingular tapped Lucent as the IMS supplier for its 3G network, which is based on HSDPA, a competing technology to Verizon Wireless’ EV-DO. Sprint says it implemented elements of the IMS architecture more than four years ago to support its ReadyLink push-to-talk service and Business Mobility Framework offering.
In other news, today in the AWS auction, T-Mobile bid $1.11 billion in an attempt to boost its lack of spectrum, reports RCR News. Growing by over $1 billion in round 8 and 9, and now by $500 million in round 10, the bids for the AWS (1.7/2.1 GHz) band now total over $4.5 billion after round 10.
