T-Mobile USA plans to launch a cell phone service as early as mid June that will allow phones to roam onto the company's Wi-Fi hot spots, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The service, called Hotspot at Home, has been tested in Seattle for several months.
When a user comes within range of a Wi-Fi hot spot, calls are transferred to the Wi-Fi network, with no disruption to the call or data service. The service is designed to improve indoor reception and cut customers' cellular bills. T-Mobile will offer customers a free, proprietary wireless router that it claims will provide better service and longer battery life.
T-Mobile currently has 25 million subscribers and 8,000 U.S. Wi-Fi hot spots. Samsung and Nokia currently offer Wi-Fi compatible phones. In the trial, customers paid $20 per month for the service. The report in the Journal says that T-Mobile has had some teething troubles with the seamless handover between cellular and Wi-Fi, but the operator expects to fix these prior to the national launch.