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jonazen
Be Like Water My Friend
Premium
join:2004-02-18
Princeton Junction, NJ
 ·T-Mobile VoIP
| reply to rosie26y
Re: @home features
Hi Rosie-
After my initial review, I experienced two brief outages in the first 4 days of use. Both times the blue LED on the router went out (this indicates loss of VoIP service) and the phones lost their dial tone. In both cases, I rebooted the router and phone service was available again within a minute.
Not ideal, but if it's just a matter of interim growing pains, I can deal with it. The second time this happened I got Customer Care on the phone, and the rep I spoke with mentioned that she had heard a couple of other complaints like mine, and that rebooting the router fixed them in all cases. As of 4 days ago (July 23) Customer Care had no official instructions from Tech Support about the issue, and there was a 20 minute hold queue when I asked about tech support, so I decided to try back another time if the problems continued.
That was 4 days ago - and I haven't had a single issue since then. Not sure what this means...perhaps T-Mobile WAS having an issue and it's been resolved - impossible to know right now. Everything else works so well that I'm willing to put up with a bit of inconvenience if it looks like it will be resolved down the road. I must say that the last 4 days of service have been flawless, which is certainly an improvement over the first 4.
Re: your question about features -- at the moment, the feature set is very basic compared to some of the other VoIP providers. Caller ID, Call Waiting, 3-Way Conference Calling, Call Forwarding and the same Voicemail that you have on your T-Mobile mobile phone account(s) are all standard.
I may be wrong, but I believe the only optional feature at the moment is "CallerTunes" (T-Mobile's version of "ringback tones" - where you can pay a small monthly fee to have a specific sound clip played for a caller instead of the ringing sound they normally hear while waiting for you to answer.
Some of the competing services certainly offer more features right now, such as web-access to voicemail (e.g., "visual voicemail") or email notification of a waiting message. Those really don't excite me, and aren't decision points for me.
The sound quality is superb with T-Mobile@Home, Customer Care at T-Mobile is excellent - and has been for years - which is one of the reasons I've stuck with them through every renewal when I had a cost-free option to change carriers. I've got the exact same people helping me now with my home phone that I do with my mobile lines. When a compare notes with my friends and colleagues who have Verizon service, the contrast is stark to say the least!
One more feature that may be significant if you call home when you're out, or somebody from home calls your mobile: if you have unlimited T-Mobile to T-Mobile as part of your plan (and I do), calls between a T-Mobile cellphone and your T-Mobile@Home account do not go against the minutes allotment in your mobile plan: your T-Mobile@Home is treated just like another T-Mobile cellphone number for the purposes of inter-phone billing. Seems that perhaps 20% of my mobile calling is to/from home, so this will reduce my minutes usage noticeably.
Some interesting tidbits regarding the setup at home:
You can plug any standard phone into the phone jack on the back of the WRTU54G-TM router. There are two jacks, and two SIM slots in the device corresponding to these: each router can handle up to two telephone numbers this way - if you want a second line, you can get a second T-Mobile@Home provisioned SIM and pay another $10/month for a second line.
I chose the DECT 6 phone from vtech that T-Mobile promotes for a couple of reasons, rather than keeping my old phones (which were perfectly good 5.8GHz vtech's). Most wireless phone sets that are designed to be expandable (multiple phones) have their own answering machine. If they have any kind of VMWI (visual message waiting indicator) on the handset, it's generally tied to the built in answering machine on the base unit. In contrast, these vtech DECT 6 phones are NOT designed to use shared proprietary answer machine -- the assumption is that you will either provide your own answering machine, or be hooked up to a 3rd party answering service such as T-Mobile's voicemail system.
The difference is that systems such as T-mobile's voicemail will typically implement an industry standard signalling technology (FSK or "stutter tone") that a number of systems will recognize. Here's what this means to you:
The WRTU54G-TM router DOES recognize the standards (FSK / stutter tone), and will indicate that a message is waiting on t-mobile voicemail by blinking the blue LED on your router for the corresponding phone line. I haven't tried this, but I'm guessing that a standard phone plugged into the router will probably play a "stutter tone" if there's a message waiting when you pick up the handset. Verizon and its predecessors (Bell Atlantic, etc) all did this for years with their managed voicemail services. Not bad - but you have to pick up the phone to see if there's a message waiting for you.
However, if you use one of the handsets designed to respond to FSK / stutter tone, you will get a visual signal on the handset showing that there's an unheard message waiting in voicemail. There are a few such phones on the market (not too many, as most assume you'll have their answering machine on your base station), but the vtech DECT 6 phones from T-Mobile are competitively priced and good quality.
My setup: once I got the first two phones (one with a base station, one extension) setup from T-Mobile, I got on vtech's website and ordered 3 more extensions at $30 a piece. They arrived at my home 2 days later. About a minute to pair each phone with the base station, and I had five handsets distributed around my house.
Now - any time there's a voice mail message waiting, ALL FIVE handsets light up the dedicated voicemail button on the phone, so I can see that there's a message waiting from anywhere in the house. The dedicated buttons on the phone come pre-programmed (they can be set to use with other vendor's voicemail systems) to work with T-Mobile voicemail - so I can call Voicemail with a single keypress, pause, skip, delete, etc with dedicated buttons.
The DECT 6 phones have great range (I walk around outside with them) and great sound quality. Between the improved audio and the natural integration of their features with T-Mobile voicemail, I'm willing to replace my old 5.8 GHz phones (which I will sell).
But it's not required: you can plug any standard phone into the WRTU54G-TM router and it will work.
One last interesting wrinkle: I've read this on a few sites -- once you disconnect "the phone company" (most likely Verizon) from your home telephone wiring (legacy in-wall wires / phone jacks / etc), the wiring is simply there for you to use. You can, for instance, get a standard phone extension cord with an RJ45 plug at each end, put one end into your WRTU54G-TM router, and the other end into a phone jack in the wall (remember: external phone service must be DISCONNECTED first!), and "light up" all the connected phone jacks in your house. You're basically powering your home wired phone system with T-Mobile now instead of "the phone company". For people who don't want to go with wireless phones in the house, this may be a perfect alternative approach.
A couple of caveats: 1) I have not personally tried this, although I have read several articles indicating that it works well. 2) I have read mixed reports about people having success with T-Mobile@Home combined with a home answering machine -- if you're counting on using a dedicated answering machine instead of T-Mobile's voicemail, I would research this more first, as it may not work.
As I write this, I'm on day 8 with T-Mobile@Home, and it has been flawless for the past 4. Assuming no surprises in the next 24 hours, I'll be asking T-Mobile to port over my home number to the service, and dropping my old combo of Verizon local and AT&T long distance, which has been costing me a total of about $75 a month for years. Instant savings of $65 a month, better customer service, and elimination of two bills in the mailbox each month, since my T-Mobile@Home line simply shows up as a new line on my existing T-Mobile monthly bill.
--
Jon
Jonathan Strong
The Strong Group
| |
rosie26y
@rr.com
| WOW! Thanks so much for all that info Jon. It's extremely helpful to me! I was pretty sure that the features were just the basic ones but I just wanted to check with people who are using the service. I have a Uniden wireless phone system at the moment. It's a 2.4gHZ. There's a DECT 6.0 system on the Uniden site that is made for the @home type service I am pondering over. It comes with the base plus an extra handset for $35 and extra handsets are on sale for $18. I've had good luck with Uniden so far. I have digital phone service and have 6 phones (3 on the uniden I mentioned and then 2 on another wireless system and one with an aswering machine.) I like the idea of what you mentioned about plugging in the @home service to "light up" all the jacks in my home. That would make things easier until I could get all the phones on one system, whether I go with the uniden or the ones t-mobile offers.
Again, thanks for all the great info. You've helped me out a lot.
 Rosie | |
jonazen
Be Like Water My Friend
Premium
join:2004-02-18
Princeton Junction, NJ
·T-Mobile VoIP
| Happy to share! I'm pleased to note that the system is still up (I was out of the house for a few hours), bringing me almost to the end of day 8 with the phones, and the end of 4 full days with no problem. I'll report back as I learn more about this and I get more experience with the service. Hopefully good news! Rosie - if you go with this, please share your experiences too.
thx!
--
Jon
Jonathan Strong
The Strong Group
| |
rosie26y
@rr.com | Ok, will do Jon!
Thanks a bunch!
Rosie | |
Probedude
join:2004-05-09
Ventura, CA
| reply to jonazen
FWIW, I've just had to reboot my T-mobile VOIP router - ironically while I was typing a note on person's blog about my problems porting my landline number over.
While typing, my Yahoo Messenger went offline. I couldn't visit or ping any external website. I couldn't log into the t-mobile/Linksys VOIP router, I could not ping my DSL modem.
I power cycled the VOIP router, everything is fine again.
Now that I think about it, I had a similar problem a few days ago but that cleared up by itself after ~ 5 mins. (That time I was able to log into my DSL modem and diagnotics on it all passed so it wasn't the problem then either).
Bugs in the router or the T-mobile service? (I'm thinking the router)
Lastly, porting of my landline has been unsuccessful as of yet though when I called yesterday (the day it was supposed to be completed) they 'took care of everything and it should work now'. Today I called I was put on hold for 25 mins, then got an operator that said that the number transfer dept. closed 15 mins ago!
I'm happy with the quality of the service. Hopefully things will just keep getting better. | |
Probedude
join:2004-05-09
Ventura, CA
| Another FWIW. The firmware for this router is no longer on Linksys website.
Since this is a router specific to T-Mobile,I wonder if all firmware updates will be obtained from T-Mobile from now on.
(I saw something similar posted regarding their SPA900 product) | |
rosie26y
@rr.com
| Thanks Jon. All good stuff to know and keep in mind. My next upgrade isn't until April so maybe a lot of these issues will be taken care of. *fingers crossed* I will just keep up with reading other people's experiences til then.
Thanks for posting, Rosie | |
rosie26y
@rr.com | reply to Probedude
Thanks for your posts also, Probedude! All this info is very useful to me!
Rosie | |
Probedude
join:2004-05-09
Ventura, CA | reply to Probedude
Took 4 calls on separate days, but finally my landline number is ported. Yay! Now I can cancel my extra phone line AND cancel long distance on the main line. | |
Probedude
join:2004-05-09
Ventura, CA | Had to power cycle the Linkys TM VOIP router today.
Wife called and said she couldn't get on the internet and the blue light was out.
This happened about 10 days ago. Others are having similar problems. | |
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