11/02/2008 NOTE: After I originally wrote this post a few months ago, T-Mobile linked to it from their t-mobileathome.com site. This has resulted in a huge number of emails/comments on the posts I’ve written about the service. While I appreciate T-Mobile linking to my blog, as all the links/hits I get drives traffic to my site and the small (very small) amount of money I make from the clicked-on ads and such help defray server costs, I want to make it clear that I have no affiliation with T-Mobile whatsoever and receive nothing from them (and never have), other than the services I’ve paid for.

I usually don’t mix personal posts on this blog, but it’s the only blog I have right now going, and well, this is a topic that people are really interested in it seems. There are very few folks who have actually signed up for the new Tmobile@Home service (I’m guessing this because so few people have info on the web about it). So, in the interest of sharing info back to the web community….here I go…

Yesterday afternoon I went to my local Tmobile store to sign up for the @Home service. I am currently paying over $60 per month for my Verizon landline, so I figured if I could get 99% up-time from this new @Home service for just $10 per month, it would be worth it. So I signed up, which took a while because, as I soon found out after saying to the sales guy, “Sign me up!”, that I in fact was the first person at that store to sign up for the service.

I have had Tmobile cell service for about 1.5 years now and have liked the service. The website is great and they seem to be on the up-and-up, so I took a calculated risk.

So, here’s the scoop:

Costs:

~$35 activation fee for the new phone number/line

My sales rep failed to mention this fee, which pisses me off but, quite frankly, I would have agreed to it anyway.

~$50 for a LinkSys router. I’ll post more details on the router later, but that is the one thing about the @Home service that there is a good bit of info on the net on.  I was using a D-Link Wireless router that had ‘Draft N’ status, so downgrading from the 802.11N to 802.11G was something I was disappointed with. Supposedly you can just connect both routers (and I have a 4-port switch laying around doing nothing to facilitate this) or chain them to the broadband source, but quite frankly I didn’t want to mess around with that. At least not during this ‘trial’ period. And besides, my wife is the only one who uses the wireless currently at my house and she’s using Ubuntu on her laptop with a wireless G card, so the N was going to waste anyway. The range of the D-Link wasn’t all that great either, so I figured I’d go with the LinkSys. Speeds seem no different to her after the switch. I can tell you that the ‘strength’ level of the wireless signal coming from the D-Link was ~34% usually, whereas the signal level from the Tmobile Linksys was just over 50% yesterday. So that was better at least.

The router certainly is much more aesthetically pleasing too : ) It has lots of lights and is cool-looking, for what that’s worth (nothing). I’ve been running it since yesterday and no drops, no problems. It has 4 ethernet ports and 2 landline ports for you to hookup your phones. Any phone can be hooked up to it (well, I suppose rotary phones can’t). I hooked up an old wireless phone base/handset that I had in my basement to it (more about why below) and it worked flawlessly. Sound quality was great and it works just like a regular phone – when you pick it up you even hear a dial-tone like a regular landline phone. I walked upstairs to my bedroom, which is at the farthest point in my house from the router, which is in my new ‘family room’ (that’s code for our recently finished basement!), and the sound quality and volume level did not change. I was worried about that and was pleasantly surprised.

Some folks on the Broadband Reports website forum, which to date is the only decent source of info I could find about this service prior to buying it, have asked me to check if the outgoing caller ID lists my name when I call another landline from the @Home phone. I’ll try that tonight and report back with a new post here.

My current landline is with Verizon, and I use Verizon DSL. I have loved the DSL (I had Comcast broadband for a couple of years, which sucked – major lag/variance in bandwidth) and have had a solid connection with no downtime for about 5 years now. 1.5mb down steady. Maybe more now, haven’t checked in a while. I am going to run some tests using the @Home service and downloading a torrent or other large file at the same time to see how things are affected. If anyone has any tips/suggestions on how to best run some valid ‘tests’ I’d love to hear them.

Well, so far I’m happy. But I’ll tell you this: I haven’t initiated the porting of my current landline number yet. I’m gonna wait one more day then start the process, which supposedly takes at least 6 days, if not 10.

My main hurdle at this point is my telephones.  I have 3 ‘levels’ to my house – the basement, main floor, and upstairs. Since the basement was recently finished, I didn’t get a new phone for down there so I’ve been ‘phoneless’ down there from a landline perspective. In our living room is a great Motorla wireless base/handset that my wife won in some contest, and upstairs is a piece of garbage $9 phone. My problem is this: my @Home router is on my computer desk in my basement. I am not going to re-rig phone lines around so that I can plug the Motorola from my living room into the router, and since I want to get a new phone base with 2 handsets anyway so all 3 floors can be covered, I’m going to stop at the Tmobile store to investigate the VTech phones they are selling. IIRC, for about $100 I can get the base and 2 handsets. The key concer/question for me is this: if I set the base up on my PC desk in the basement,  no one will be able to see whether a new voicemail has arrived unless the handsets have some sort of flashing indicator on them. Hopefully they do. If not, I’ll have to find a set of phones that do work that way. And if that won’t work, I’ll re-think the setup of the @Home wiring. I can do it, I’m just too busy to do that these days. Also, allegedly, TMobile claims that the VTECH phones they are recommending/selling also include some special features/buttons specific to the @Home service. So, we’ll see. I’ll report back.

UPDATE 07.17.08: I’m noticing that many folks are coming directly to this post via the TMobile@Home website (which has linked directly to this post).

Please note that I have added some more posts regarding the @home service. Click here to view them.