手機在家打出新花樣

劉志存

不想在家中隨身帶著手機，可家人和朋友又常常會撥打自己的手機，如何是好？T-Mobile最近推出的一項服務便幫助人們解決了這個麻煩。

The poor landline home phone is getting less and less respect. Increasing numbers of people dont even have traditional landline phone service any more. These folks prefer to rely on their cellphones, which can be cheaper to use and carry a number that travels with a person instead of being locked to a house.

Many others keep their landline-phone service grudgingly, only because it is needed for things like fax machines. But even they often use their cellphones at home, because their friends and family members dial their cellphone number routinely, and their personal phone books are inside their cellphones.

But there is a big drawback to using a cellphone at home, especially in a large house. You have to schlep it around with you from room to room. By contrast, landline phone service can be used via either cordless or corded extension phones. Now, T-Mobile, one of the big U.S. cellphone companies, is rolling out a new system that it hopes to make cellphone service at home more convenient and even cheaper to use.

The service, being introduced this month in two test cities, Seattle and Dallas, allows you to use a cellphone account with any corded or cordless home phone, with multiple extensions, for just $10 a month. That very low price gets you unlimited domestic calls.

This new T-Mobile service, tentatively called Talk Forever Home Phone, is likely to be available nationally in a few months. It works via a special Wi-Fi wireless router that you must buy, with a two-year contract, for a one-time charge of $50. The router, which can either replace or supplement your existing wireless router, is essentially a stationary cellphone that marries an in-home Wi-Fi network to the T-Mobile cellphone network.

手機在家打出新花樣

人們對家用固定電話的興趣越來越低了，許多人現在甚至已不再使用傳統的固定電話了。這些人寧愿依靠他們的手機。手機不但資費便宜，并且還能在外出時隨身攜帶，而不僅僅只限于在家中使用。

還有許多人勉強保留著固定電話，原因只是傳真機等設備離不開它。但即使是這些人也常常在家中使用手機，因為他們的朋友或家人通常會撥打他們的手機，這些人的聯系方式也都存在手機中。

但在家中，尤其是有不少房間的大房子中使用手機有一個明顯的不足之處：你到哪個房間時都需要隨身帶著手機。而固定電話則可以通過布置分機在各個房間中使用。如今，美國最大的手機公司之一T-Mobile推出了一種新系統，能讓用戶在家中更方便，甚至更便宜地使用手機。

此項服務將于本月在西雅圖和達拉斯兩個城市進行測試，這種服務可讓人們通過家中的有繩或無繩電話及其多個分機使用其手機號碼，每月僅收費10美元。這個很低的價格可以讓你無限制地撥打國內電話。

這種服務暫時命名為Talk Forever Home Phone，幾個月內就可能會在全美推廣。你需要簽訂兩年期合約，一次性掏出50美元購買一個特制的Wi-Fi無線路由器。這種路由器實際上就是將室內Wi-Fi網絡同T-Mobile手機網絡結合到一起的靜止手機，它可以代替你現有的路由器，或是一同使用。