BT Group Launches Combined Mobile/Land Line

[Trippledence]

BT's pitch on this is one gets the convenience and features of the mobile and the quality and rates of the land line. Calls over broadband in the home means customers can make a mobile call but with the quality of a fixed-line and worry less about the signal being lost or dropping out. A recent survey of BT Broadband customer revealed that as many as 19 per cent had experienced problems with mobile coverage in the home. Ian Livingston, CEO for BT Retail, said: "We promised to launch the world's first seamless combined fixed and mobile service and now we're doing it. The service will transform the communications landscape and bring excellent value to customers. This new system will work will be a Blue Tooth hub set up in the home and the hub will also act as a Wi-Fi wireless router. BT says that the switching process will work seamlessly as you come into range or move out of the range of the hub, even if the user is in mid call. When users sign up for the service, they get a Motorola V560 mobile phone and the hub. The small flip phone has 5 megs of memory and a digital camera and many other standard features. The hub acts as the Blue Tooth and Wi-Fi in the home. One can hook up to 6 mobile phones to it and handle 3 simultaneous calls and then broadband access to the Internet for PCs and game consoles. The system looks pretty keen on a number of levels. It certainly provides the one-stop-shop so many businesses strive for. Users will be able to take care of everything in one punch and, just like the good old days when the phone company provided you with the phone.

Not sure if that could be good or rubbish, it seems good to me, all comes down to the cost of calls at the end of the day.

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/news/ebusi...eLandLine.html

[Yohji]

Yeah, we'll have to wait and see. Sounds like a good idea though.

[ikonia]

this idea has been tried before, and by BT I think

Basiclly a mobile hand set that when within X range of a base station it would bill at land line costs and as it moved out of range it would go onto the mobile network and bill at mobile rates.

I don't think it took off at all and there was teething problems.

This was a few years ago though

[Dooms]

Good Idea however i dont have a BT landline and i dont want to be with BT Mobile - Ill wait for the technology to get better and other service providers to join in

[Trippledence]

From what i read it sounded like the system used VOIP serevices and a BT base station, if you had to have BT internet conection it would put me off for sure. As Dooms says i wouldnt want to be with BT mobile! And didnt they dispand that any way, i presume it would use another network as a carrier (o2 most likely).

[Jonny M]

The problem is, they are still trying to charge landline rates for VoIP calls, which is crazy. Also the problems with it are:

Needs BT Broadband
Needs that horrbile Motorola handset
It's not on Orange

[jimborae]

This is a fairly good analysis of it

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06...fusion_launch/

[Trippledence]

Shame a resonable idear has been shot in the foot my monoploistic phone companys. As fast internet and hotspots come more widespead i'll be glad to see the back of BT, theres no reason in todays world of High Bandwith tecnology that you should be billed per minuit.

[Atomic]

When I can use it on o2 and my nice non-BT ADSL connection maybe...

[Dooms]

Yep - i would have to have it work on Bulldog & 02