Friday, March 04, 2011

T-Mobile Talks Up It's Wi-Fi Calling Advantage

At Mobile World Congress, T-Mobile’s Josh Lonn spent some time talking with several different editors about the company’s success with the Wi-Fi Calling service.

In Monica Alleven’s article “Wi-Fi Calling is Talk of the Town,” she quotes Mr. Lonn saying “We believe this is more effective [than femtocells].”

Mike Dano with Fierce Wireless wrote that T-Mobile has approximately 5 millions Wi-Fi Calling users today, with about 1.25 million on the new Android version of the service.

In Total Telecom’s piece, “Wi-Fi Offload?  There’s an app for that,” Mary Lennighan quotes Mr. Lonn saying: “We’re putting [coverage] on the device side rather than something that plugs into the wall.”

Network World’s Nancy Gohring’s trend piece on ‘small cells’ on femtocells and Wi-Fi covered both sides of the debate.  But T-Mobile’s quote hit the nail on the head. “Wi-Fi is robust.  Why do something as complicated as a femto?” questioned Mr. Lonn.

But it was TMoNews that really summed up the situation, writing “Personally, I believe T-Mobile hit a home run with the Wi-Fi Calling service over that of a femtocell.”

I couldn’t agree more.

2 comments:

Andrew said...

Any idea on if a solution for the Gingerbread-powered Nexus S is coming soon?

Kineto Wireless said...

You'd have to ask T-Mo about that; the operators drive the phone deployments and announcements.