I hope this is the last telephony post for a while - it can’t be that interesting.

That said here’s another telephony post!

T-Mobile announced a new dual mode phone; there’s a piece on the New York Times about it. With T-Mobile HotSpot @Home your calls can be placed on any 802.11b/g wireless and it will fall back to the T-Mobile cellular network when it needs to.

These phones hand off your calls from Wi-Fi network to cell network seamlessly and automatically, without a single crackle or pop to punctuate the switch. As you walk out of a hot spot, fewer and fewer Wi-Fi signal bars appear on the screen, until — blink! — the T-Mobile network bars replace them. (The handoff as you move in the opposite direction, from the cell network into a hot spot, is also seamless, but takes slightly longer, about a minute.)

It’s offered as $10 per month you can add to any individual plan of $39.99 per month or higher. It’s still tied to a contract, and your number is still tightly coupled to a cellular network, but it’s a step in the right direction at least. Hopefully it’s popular enough to force other providers to follow suit.