T-Mobile brings HotSpot @Home service to business BlackBerry users
By Will Park on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 1:26 PM PST In Announcements, BlackBerry, BlackBerry OS, RIM (Research in Motion), T-Mobile, UMA, WiFi
T-Mobile (NYSE: DT)’s been pioneering UMA service for a while now. Known as T-Mobile HotSpot @Home, the service allows compatible WiFi-enabled mobile phones to use a WiFi network to make voice calls rather than the T-Mobile wireless network. The service has apparently shown enough success in the consumer space that T-Mobile USA has decided to bring its WiFi-calling service to the enterprise. T-Mobile says WiFi-capable BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) smartphones, which are by far the most popular handset in corporate America, will soon be able to make calls over their WiFi networks. Just like HotSpot @Home, phone calls can be seamlessly handed-off to T-Mobile cellular network. Think of it as T-Mobile HotSpot @Office.
The move to bring UMA to the business space makes sense. T-Mobile’s 1900Mhz network has a hard time penetrating walls and buildings (higher frequencies just don’t pass through solid objects as well as lower frequencies). That poses a problem to business users that spend a lot of their time as drones inside an office building. T-Mobile is taking aim at AT&T (NYSE: T) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ)’s enterprise subscriber-base by giving the largest business smartphone demographic (BlackBerry users) access to WiFi-based voice calls.
[Via: Reuters]
