I love when companies give Walt Mossberg something to tryout, and like it even more when Walt tries additional hard to form something easy to understand like he did today.

Basically in his review of the T-Mobile @ HOME service he points out the warts of the system, particularly the Home Alarm system and Fax machine issues. The Home Alarm issue can likely be solved by Next Alarm, as their Alarm Broadband Network is the ideal compliment to an IP based phone system. The faxing issue is one that has been a hassle for most humans in VoIP plus and while there are solutions, what I’m finding easier these days is to scan and e mail to send a fax, and to have one of those free services to receive faxes by e mail.

The best and most revealing line

about the @HOME service though is that one:

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 by the Net, but merely uses the Web to get them to the T-Mobile cellphone network, which soon after carries the calls as whether they had been made on a cellphone.

What Walt’s referring to is UMA and how T-Mobile uses ATM to transmit input from one point to another. Its not IP end to end, but does use the ‘Net from his house to the ATM spine. I’m glad he said that considering it differs from other services already out there which do use SIP and IP end to end like Earthlink’s TrueVoice, BroadVoice and mostly CallVantage, though some users are on MGCP.

Original post by Andy Abramson