WIRELESS WATCH
Disney Mobile: Worth It For Parents? - Disney recently introduced a Disney-brand mobile phone that is being targeted at families with 8-12 year old children in the house. Pricing for service plans has not yet been announced, but the handsets themselves are expected to retail for $60 with a two-year service agreement. With numbers hard to come by, it’s difficult for us to recommend this phone to consumers. That said, the feature list on the Disney Mobile phones is impressive, especially for parents. First, the service will allow parents to set an allowance of airtime minutes and text-messages for their children. Once the limit is reached, the parent and the child will be alerted and an option given to allow for more usage or to restrict use. This will help parents whose children tend to run up large overages and high text messaging costs. Second, parents will have the ability to designate “safe lists” of phone numbers that the phones can call or text. Numbers not on those lists can be blocked. Finally, the phones will have a GPS locator device implanted in them. Parents can then use their own Disney Mobile handset or log on to the Disney Mobile website to find out the approximate location of their child’s device. It is worth noting, also, that the Disney Mobile service will be using Sprint Nextel’s CDMA2000 1x EV-DO network. In J.D. Power and Associate’s 2006 Wireless Call Quality Performance Study, Sprint Nextel’s network service quality was below average in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast regions. It was ranked above-average in the North Central, Southwest, and West regions and average in the Northeast region. To read more about this study, click here. Sprint Nextel also ranked below average in J.D. Power’s 2006 Wireless Customer Care Performance Study. To read more about the Customer Care survey, click here. For more information about Disney Mobile, visit http://disney.go.com/disneymobile/.
VOIP WATCH
VoSKY Call Center Could Make Skype Much More Practical – The “killer app” that turns the much-hyped Skype VoIP calling service into a practical phone replacement may be on the horizon. With 25 million users, Skype is already more popular than mainstream VoIP carriers such as Vonage or Packet8. This is mostly due to Skype being free to use for PC-to-PC calling between Skype users worldwide. The big catch with Skype up until now has been that users had to be sitting at their PCs with a headset on to use the service, making it rather cumbersome for today’s mobility-obsessed consumers. Enter VoSKY’s Call Center product. The Call Center product is a small box that attaches to a P.C. via a USB cable, a phone line, and a telephone. Users then assign speed-dial numbers to their Skype contacts. Using a regular telephone connected to the Call Center box, the user then dials “##” followed by the speed-dial number assigned to the Skype contact they want to call. The call is then connected as usual to the caller’s Skype contact who answers and commences the conversation normally. The Call Center user can then move around the house (assuming the phone used is cordless) and chat as they would on a normal telephone call. Users of VoSKY’s Call Center can also use the service from their cellular phones. The cellular caller calls their home phone number and after a designated number of rings, the Call Center device picks up the call and requests the user’s password. Once this is entered, the Call Center will prompt the caller for their Skype contact’s speed-dial number and the call is then connected normally. Users of Skype-Out (Skype fee-based service for calling non-Skype telephone numbers) can also assign a regular telephone number a speed-dial number and use the Call Center to call out. This is a very economical way for cellular phone users to call overseas, especially to Europe, as Skype Out’s 2.1¢ per minute rates to most European countries beats most traditional wireline carriers’ (and even many VoIP carriers’) international calling rates handily. Note that calls using a cellular phone still incur airtime usage charges. Incoming calls, whether from Skype or a traditional phone user, will ring normally to a Call Center-enabled phone or any other phone to which the call is forwarded. One catch with the Call Center is that a user’s computer must be on, with Skype running, at all times. For users worried about high electricity bills, this could be a problem. VoSKY’s Call Center retails for $69.95. For more information, click here.
TRAC IN THE NEWS
Drop a Line to Avoid Double Taxes Recommends Simon – Consumer may want to consider dropping unneeded services to avoid the high taxes on telecommunications, suggested TRAC Chairman Samuel Simon during an appearance on CNN’s “In the Money” program last Saturday. “You might find that you could not even have a long distance company [since] long distance companies charge you monthly long distance recurring charges, universal service fees," said Simon. “You can actually look at what you're doing, drop something and probably save a lot of money and not lose any real service. Most people today are buying too much, more than they need and use.” A full transcript of Saturday’s “In the Money” program is available online by clicking here.
INTERESTING LINKS
FCC Main Page: http://www.fcc.gov
FCC Complaint Form - http://svartifoss2.fcc.gov/cib/fcc475.cfm
List of State Regulatory Commissions: http://www.naruc.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=15
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