But, if you know anything about hotspot @ home, you'll know that you can call back to the states on the wi-fi using only your bucket of minutes, or by paying $9.99/month to have unlimited wi-fi minutes. When I was in Israel this past April, I made loads of calls back to the US without paying T-Mobile's $2.99/minute rate while in Israel. I can only imagine what my bill would have been.

And I'm pretty sure that T-Mobile is the only US carrier offering the option to route voice calls, not just data, over wi-fi. The original marketing behind the feature was to allow you to get great coverage for your T-Mobile phone in your own home, using a home wireless router and DSL/cable Internet connection. But the ability to use the phone internationally without paying roaming charges is a much bigger deal if you ever travel out of the country with it.

Sprint started to roll out a service and then backed out of it so it left T-mobile as the sole provider in this space. It's a nifty feature, just not marketed well. I had the opportunity to partake in the beta test a few years ago and i loved it then and was excited when they did finally roll it out.

At least they got wise and dropped the price back down to $10 from the $20 they had for a while.

In my case, I don't pay the $10 per month. I just use my bucket of minutes. I have 1000 per month + N&W. So, I come close, but never over my allotment. It's nice to have the option to have unlimited wi-fi though.

That's what I plan on doing. I have the same voice plan, and never go over. So I'd just allow the wi-fi calls to go to my regular bucket of minutes.

Is that only wi-fi through a T-Mobile hot spot?

Can one of you T-Mobile experts clarify it for me...

Do you mean if you have a phone capable of Hotspot@Home, then you don't need to sign up on any special plan or service, and you can use Wi-Fi connections from anywhere in the world with free Wi-Fi access to call by only using your minutes in your regular voice plan?

Or does one have to have a data plan?

And what's the rate for Wi-Fi to international numbers, like home to Europe? Europe to US? Europe locally?

The info seems to be hard to find on T-Mobile's website.

Nope. Will work on any wi-fi access point you can connect to.

You can bind it to any WiFi hotspot you have access to. In the states, it will bind to any T-mobile Hotspot location. Interestingly, i could bind to the T-moblie hotspots in the UK, but it wasn't connecting back to the back-end service so I couldn't use it to make calls.

When connected to the service, it's like making calls from the states. So, if you're calling a number local to the country you're in, it's a long distance call from the states.

They don't give too much info on the service, but they have secretly said they know people are doing this and they are ok with it.

And, no, you don't need a data plan either. If you have the plan, it doesn't eat away at your minutes. If you don't have the plan, then it does. All you need is a Hotspot@Home capable phone and off you go.

I must be bored, i feel like poking a bear today. In more interesting news, I may be moving to DXB for six months.

fozz - Thanks for the info! Much appreciated.

Cool. I've been wanting to visit that region for some time, but am not that interested in EK's C Product on the nonstop. I think I will wait until QR starts IAH-DOH, as I'll be able to redeem BD miles for that one, for F or C.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) BlackBerry8100/4.2.1 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/100)

Or you could fly EK's nonstop Y and sit 10 across in the 777. ;)

The cool part is that from the sounds of it, i'll be covering the middle east, Africa and Russia, so that part of my flightmemory map should start filling up before the Stan DO. :)

I guess I'll have to see how good EK really is.

Yes, yes! I could also pay for it (rather than redeeming miles), and enjoy the experience for $1,600, all without earning CO EQMs. Where do I sign up? :D