T-Mobile @Home HiPort adapter

My 2-year contract with T-Mobile for mobile phone usage is up this February. I’m on the ‘Family Talk 1000′ plan, so my wife and I both have a phone with a shared pool of 1000 minutes (it cost me $49.95 total for both phones and has been great for us).

The one thing I never liked though is the Samsung phones we picked out. For one, we made the big mistake of each picking the same phone and same color. And my wife is too lazy to check her wallpaper before picking up a phone and leaving the house so invariably she takes my phone…

Anyways…so I was looking at T-Mobile’s website for phones and stumbled upon this thing:

Here is the link with the details:

http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/phones/Cell-Phone-Detail.aspx?tp=tb1&cell-phone=T-Mobile-@Home-HiPort-adapater

I didn’t know this existed! I wish it existed when I had purchased the service, as I scrapped a fairly new D-Link Wireless N router for the T-Mobile@Home/LinkSys wireless G router. While the LinkSys router works great and gives a strong signal, I was bummed that I had to ‘downgrade’ to the G standard. Since my wife is the one using the wifi mostly, and she runs Ubuntu linux, and when I use the wireless it is with my G-card, work-supplied, Dell laptop, the N was a waste anyways.

I’m surprised T-Mobile is going this route, as it seems to me at this point it’s still pretty early in their foray into VOIP and they might want to stick with the tried-and-true before venturing into allowing other routers (and the settings/customizations/issues that may bring their Support folks). On the other hand, it tells me that the service is probably working great for 99% of people and T-Mobile figures they may as well offer this instead of forcing people to buy a wireless G router, knowing that a lot of folks will insist on ‘piggy-backing’ their existing router anyway.

But, my ramblings aside – has anyone reading this used the HiPort adapter instead of the LinkSys router? If so, have you had any service issues? Please share your experiences with it.