All of T-Mobile U.S. and John Legere’s announcements and ‘Un-carrier’ events have come as a great revisiting of old methods and technologies, changing the way a customer gets a hold of a device, all the way to how often you can get a hold of a new one and some radical new plans for these radically-acquired devices. But this week’s Un-carrier 7.0 event was far from the norm for events of similar naming. Un-carrier 7 brought with it no new plans for pricing, or new ways to update what’s in your pocket and purse, but it brought Wi-Fi instead. Listen, T-Mobile is great for the addition of Wi-Fi calling on the latest devices from the big magenta un-carrier, and the new router from T-Mobile, dubbed Cellspot, is set to hopefully change how people use their in-home or at-work Wi-Fi connection(s).
The Cellspot is a Wi-Fi router, and that’s really all that makes it normal. It is a proprietary router, special to T-Mobile, and it only gets better. With a maximum range of three thousand (that’s 3,000 for those number-lovers) square feet, it improves over almost all, if not every current Wi-Fi router’s spread and coverage. What’s more is that the router is set to be usable especially for phone calls made over Wi-Fi instead of the cellular network. The pricing seems rather worth note as well, seeing as it’s T-Mobile who’s offering up this new tool. If you are a current (or are when the router is actually released, that is) post-paid customer, then you get the router ‘for free’ after a$25 deposit. this is connected to the Wi-Fi Unlimited deal with Un-carrier 7.0 as well, where more people were encouraged to switch and upgrade to smartphones with Wi-Fi calling abilities.
Here’s the reasoning though. T-Mobile is, by amount of owned and operated spectrum, the smallest carrier in the United States. That is true. The number of customers they have is growing by the day, since their strategies for upsetting the basic and traditional (and really quite irksome, if we’re being honest here) model of a carrier and its services. That’s also true. But the regardless of those two, and many other, factors, wireless spectrum has issues when passing through building walls, and you get worse reception as a result. The Cellspot is a hopeful answer to the issue of indoor reception and coverage, so that T-Mobile can send all possible calls through the router instead of straining the network to work indoors. That seems pretty wise of them, actually.
And as a last note, and really could ‘this could happen’ kind of feature of the Cellspot, auto-authenticate. Know a friend is coming over to the house and they have no reception, but would love to use Spotify to play some bangin’ tunes while you catch up, play video games, or what have you? Well, you can sign them into the router so they just turn Wi-Fi on on their device and it’s all ready to go and set that playlist on play. But really, that sounds like quite the useful and convenient feature, especially if you have a lot of people (such as a business or corporation headquarters building) that need access, they don’t have to sign themselves in. That’s clever thinking T-Mobile. Let’s see how it pans out. Do you think that the Cellspot is a good, although not novel, idea? If you have T-Mobile, would you consider getting one? And if you aren’t subscribed to the magenta un-carrier, would it be a feature that might be worth switching for?