Mark Welch

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    • T-Mobile to Launch Wi-Fi-Enabled Cellphones This Summer [view article]
      You wrote: "T-Mobile will offer customers a free, proprietary wireless router that it claims will provide better service and longer battery life."

      First, the router isn't entirely free, it's $50 with a promise of a $50 rebate some time later; you must still pay sales tax. But that's a minor issue.

      Far more important is the REAL REASON why T-Mobile offers a "free" router: its proprietary implementation of WiFi isn't compatible with other 802.11 wireless routers. (This means that these phones can't reliably connect to 99% of the wireless routers installed in the USA.)

      My wife and I switched to this service two weeks ago, and immediately experienced a very high level of dropped calls, both on WiFi and on cellular signals. It didn't take long to learn something important that T-Mobile doesn't advertise: its implementation of WiFi is non-standard; they use a proprietary variation of the WiFi standard, and they won't disclose how it works, except to licensees who make routers for T-Mobile. Without their router, connections are intermittent, at best. And like you, our experience was that calls dropped from WiFi didn't "hop" onto T-Mobile. We finally returned the phones and cancelled the service today, after we "recaptured" our phone numbers through a different carrier.

      www.markwelch.com/pers...       Sep 10 06:50 PM
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