Pity poor T-Mobile’s flacks. The company recently launched the commercial availability of its HotSpot@Home mobile voice service, which leverages both traditional cellular and new Wi-Fi technologies. Although the service, available only in Seattle, is now in true commercial service mode, the kinks haven’t been fully worked out of the system and T-Mobile wasn’t looking for any real publicity yet.
That didn’t stop the New York Times’ Glenn Fleishman from walking up to a mall kiosk, signing up for the service and then writing a lengthy review of the quasi-experimental offering. On top of that, one of HotSpot@Home’s earliest customers was Matthew Miller, a columnist for Geek.com and ZDNet.
Fleishman’s review is not good — but it’s not terrible either. He writes that the service “is a reasonable first draft of what could become a reliable alternative to both all-cellular networks and an emerging set of Wi-Fi-only phones.” But first-draft it is, with the biggest problem being frequently dropped calls — the transition from Wi-Fi to cellular and back again hasn’t been worked out that well yet.
But T-Mobile is pulling out all the other stops it can to keep customers on the new service. When Fleishman called to cancel, T-Mobile offered him $350 to cover early-termination penalties he would have incurred from his traditional carrier, plus sweetened the deal with an additional $100 use credit, if only he would stick with the service.
Alas, this kind of bad press can stink up a product’s prospects for a long time. Even when it fixes the technical glitches, which it undoubtedly will, T-Mobile is going to have to rehabilitate HotSpot@Home’s image.
Cynthia Brumfield at 1:10 PM|Comments(0)
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