手机在家打出新花样

The poor landline home phone is getting less and less respect. Increasing numbers of people don't even have traditional landline phone service anymore. These folks prefer to rely on their cellphones, which can be cheaper to use and carry a number that travels with a person instead of being locked to a house.

Many others keep their landline-phone service grudgingly, only because it is needed for things like fax machines. But even they often use their cellphones at home, because their friends and family members dial their cellphone number routinely, and their personal phone books are inside their cellphones.

But there is a big drawback to using a cellphone at home, especially in a large house: You have to schlep it around with you from room to room. By contrast, landline phone service can be used via either cordless or corded extension phones. Now, T-Mobile, one of the big U.S. cellphone companies, is rolling out a new system that it hopes will make cellphone service at home more convenient and even cheaper to use.

The service, being introduced this month in two test cities, Seattle and Dallas, allows you to use a cellphone account with any corded or cordless home phone, with multiple extensions, for just $10 a month. That very low price gets you unlimited domestic calls.

This new T-Mobile service, tentatively called Talk Forever Home Phone, is likely to be available nationally in a few months. It works via a special Wi-Fi wireless router that you must buy, with a two-year contract, for a one-time charge of $50. The router, which can either replace or supplement your existing wireless router, is essentially a stationary cellphone that marries an in-home Wi-Fi network to the T-Mobile cellphone network.

I have been testing the new system and found that it worked well, and it was extremely simple to set up and use. For my tests, I used a cordless phone supplied by T-Mobile, which included a base station and one extension handset. I was able to make and receive calls all over my home in exactly the same manner, and with exactly the same quality, as I do with my normal cordless landline service.

While T-Mobile is selling this cordless phone as a $60 option, it isn't necessary for use with the new $10 service. The only new hardware that is required is the special Wi-Fi router.

However, there are some significant downsides to the new T-Mobile service that might make people think twice about dumping their landlines. For one thing, it doesn't work with fax machines, home-security systems and other devices that rely on dial-up modems. Also, unlike landline phones, it doesn't automatically transmit your home address to 911 emergency centers. You have to manually supply that address to T-Mobile during signup, and the company then sends it to your local emergency center.

Another downside: You must be a T-Mobile cellphone customer to buy and use this $10 monthly home service, and your T-Mobile plan must either be an individual plan costing at least $40 a month or a family plan costing at least $50 a month.

Finally, while you can transfer your current landline phone number to this new service, it cannot share your existing T-Mobile cellphone number. So people who are used to calling you on your cellphone will still do so, and you will still have to race for the cellphone or carry it around to receive those calls. You also can't transfer your cellphone's address book to the new home phone.

The special router is made by Linksys and looks very much like a typical Linksys router, except for the fact that it has two standard telephone jacks in the back and slots inside for T-Mobile SIM cards, the same kind that are inside a T-Mobile cellphone.

You can use the special router as a replacement for your current Wi-Fi router, but I just plugged it into an existing port on my old router, inserted the SIM card, and then plugged the cordless-phone base station into one of the phone jacks. It worked immediately, and didn't affect or degrade my existing Internet service.

In addition to enabling the phone service around my house, the router was also usable by my computers for Internet connectivity, though it doesn't support the new, fast 'n' flavor of Wi-Fi.

This new system is not a so-called voice-over-Internet-protocol phone system, such as Vonage. It doesn't carry your phone calls wholly over the Internet, but merely uses the Internet to get them to the T-Mobile cellphone network, which then carries the calls as if they had been made on a cellphone.

T-Mobile says the system will work fine even if you don't have T-Mobile cellphone coverage at your house, because the call doesn't rely on the cellphone network for its first leg and only is routed to the cell network once it reaches a T-Mobile switching center.

If you are a T-Mobile customer and can live with this system's drawbacks, the $10 monthly fee may be hard to resist. But this new system is far from a perfect replacement for landline phones.

人们对家用固定电话的兴趣越来越低了，许多人现在甚至已不再使用传统的固定电话了。这些人宁愿依靠他们的手机。手机不但资费便宜，并且还能在外出时随身携带，而不仅仅只限于在家中使用。

还有许多人勉强保留着固定电话，原因只是传真机等设备离不开它。但即使是这些人也常常在家中使用手机，因为他们的朋友或家人通常会拨打他们的手机，这些人的联系方式也都存在手机中。

但在家中，尤其是有不少房间的大房子中使用手机有一个明显的不足之处：你到哪个房间时都需要随身带着手机。而固定电话则可以通过布置分机在各个房间中使用。如今，美国最大的手机公司之一T-Mobile推出了一种新系统，能让用户在家中更方便，甚至更便宜地使用手机。

此项服务将于本月在西雅图和达拉斯两个城市进行测试，这种服务可让人们通过家中的有绳或无绳电话及其多个分机使用其手机号码，每月仅收费10美元。这个很低的价格可以让你无限制地拨打国内电话。

这种服务暂时命名为Talk Forever Home Phone，几个月内就可能会在全美推广。你需要签订两年期合约，一次性掏出50美元购买一个特制的Wi-Fi无线路由器。这种路由器实际上就是将室内Wi-Fi网络同T-Mobile手机网络结合到一起的静止手机，它可以代替你现有的路由器，或是一同使用。

我一直在对这款新系统进行测试，发现效果不错，安装和使用也很简单。我在测试中使用了T-Mobile提供的无绳电话，它包括一个座机和一个无绳电话机。我在家中任何地方都能用同样的方式接打电话，质量也都是一样的，与我使用普通无绳固定电话相同。

尽管T-Mobile将这款无绳电话作为选装件以60美元出售，但每月10美元的这项新服务不一定非要使用这款电话。唯一必备的硬件就是需要一个特制Wi-Fi路由器。

不过，T-Mobile推出的新服务也有一些明显的缺陷，让人们对彻底放弃固定电话持慎重态度。首先，它不能与传真机、家庭安全系统或其他需要使用拨号调制解调器的设备配合使用。而且，与固定电话不同的是，它不能自动将你的家庭地址传送至911应急中心。而是需要你在签约时自己将地址提供给T-Mobile，然后由该公司将这一信息发送给你当地的应急中心。

另一个不足之处是：你必须成为T-Mobile的手机用户才能购买和使用这种每月10美元的家庭服务，而且只能是要么选用每月基础费用为40美元的T-Mobile个人套餐，要么是基础费用为50美元的家庭套餐。

最后，尽管能将目前的固定电话号码转移到这项新服务上，但它却不能与你现有的T-Mobile手机号码共享此服务。因此习惯于拨打你手机的人还是要这样做，而你也仍然需要跑过去接手机，或是随身带着手机。你也不能将手机通讯录转移到新的家庭电话上。

这种特制路由器是由Linksys生产的，外观非常象典型的Linksys路由器，不同之处在于它的后面有两个标准电话插孔，内部则有T-Mobile SIM卡插槽，与T-Mobile手机内的插槽一样。

你可以用这种特制路由器替代现有的Wi-Fi路由器，但我只是将其插入到原有路由器的接口上，装上了SIM卡，然后将无绳电话座机插入到背后的一个电话插孔中。它立刻就能使用了，并没有影响或是降低现有的互联网服务。

除了让人们能在家中使用手机服务外，这款路由器还能用于电脑上网，不过它不支持更快的Wi-Fi“n”系列新标准。

这种新系统不是Vonage那种所谓的互联网语音传输协议(VOIP)电话系统。它不是完全在互联网上传输电话呼叫，而只是用互联网将其传到T-Mobile的手机网络上，然后由手机网络按照手机呼叫的方式进行处理。

T-Mobile表示，即使你的家中没有T-Mobile手机信号覆盖，这种系统也能正常工作，因为呼叫在一开始并不依靠手机网络，只是在到达T-Mobile的交换机中心时才引导至手机网络中。

如果你是T-Mobile的用户，并能够接受该系统的不足，那么恐怕很难拒绝每月10美元费用的诱惑。但这款新系统要想彻底取代固定电话恐怕还有很长的路要走。