T-mobile: save money on home phone calls

If you have T-mobile, they have rolled out a new way of making phone calls. You can use your cell phone to make free calls via Wi-Fi. According to customer service, your T-mobile cell phone will use your home Wi-Fi or public Wi-Fi at Starbucks, universities, St. Marys, hotels, airports, etc. . . to make calls without using your calling-plan minutes. From what I understand, this new feature is very similar to VoIP and the wireless-internet phones used at Mayo St. Marys.

It's called Hotspot @Home

Caveats:

• Cost $10/month
• special phone required: Samsung t409 or the Nokia 6086, $50 each with discount, $160 without discount
• FREE domestic long distance calls anywhere you find WiFi without using your minutes=huge savings if you have a high-minute calling plan.
• Supposedly, you can travel overseas and call back to the USA for FREE since the cost to send data via the internet from Rochester, MN is the same as sending network data from Rochester, United Kindom. However, if you're in the UK and call the person standing next to you, you will be charged international long distance since your account originates in the USA (customer service could have miss led me on this point so I won't believe it until I see it.)
• No more need for a home phone since your "home phone" now travels with you.
• Mayo discount for T-mobile suscribers is always a plus.

I'll undoubtedly be testing this new technology soon. The following website does a good job of summarizing some of the pros and cons:

http://blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/2007/07/15/peer_review_tmo.html

John

PS. We've survived almost 1 month of internship!