I am a avid user of UMA as I get little to no signal at my house. UMA is the reason I switched from another carrier. I am getting concerned about the future availability of the feature. I was in a TMO corporate store yesterday looking at the handset offerings. They have no non smart phones that have UMA. They used to carry the Samsung t339 and the Nokia 7510 plus a few others. The Blackberrys are listed as having WIFI calling. There is no mention of "HotSpot enabled" phones even on the Blackberrys. Does this mean my only option for a new handset is a Blackberry or is this the start of the phase out of UMA?
As of today BBs are the only devices sold through T-Mobile with UMA. Hopefully RIM continues to include UMA on new handset sold through T-Mobile in the future. T-Mobile did say they are discontinuing the @Home services, but nothing concrete about UMA itself. I think it's a bad move on T-Mobile's part to drop UMA altogether. If they are smart they will have a femocell out soon to help with bad coverage like all the other carriers have. If you want to know more about UMA check this site out. UMA Today
What are the practical differences for a home user? Is it the handoff capability? I use WiFi for calls at home sometimes on my Cliq without any problems. I have used UMA as well on Blackberries I used to own.
The handoffs are the biggest difference I can think of. Even though most phones deal with UMA like roaming and if they see the slightest bit of signal from the tower it will switch. The other difference is no downloading of 3rd party apps or signing up for 3rd party service to make it work. This is all still very new to me and still trying to understand it all. It will be easier once I get my BB8900 this week.
My Regional Biz Dev Manager for T-Mobile told my company that are 2 planned regular feature phones (non smartphone) in the works for deployment later this year that are UMA capable. He wouldn't elaborate on the manufacturer or timeframe. He did tell me that they continue to "struggle," from a support standpoint with the feature since they can't control the user environment especially with each user having their own ISP or routing equipment. Many users don't know how to provision their equipment with the proper QoS settings to prioritize voice and some ISP's don't play friendly. There was also a very high return rate on their own supported routing equipment they'd sell for the service. Adoption rates of the service (as a whole) was relatively low but I attribute this to a lack of advertising and a sales organization who never really educated the customer on its benefits. My company is setting up a large WiFi network in our corporate office to support the service. We are very close to signing up a new MCSA with T-Mobile US and port all our lines from Verizon Wireless to take advantage of the service. At least for BIz Customers, T-Mobile US still pushes the unlimited WiFi calling feature as well as the ability to make free calls back to the US from abroad using the IPSEC over GSM technology. T-Mobile is really going to get aggressive in the B2B sector and push this feature along with Cisco VOIP / BlackBerry convergence albeit with little TV or Radio advertising.
