Sprint's New Unlimited Wireless Calling to Home or Office

Posted Mar 9th 2006 8:39AM by Brian White
Filed under: Cellular, DIY

In what is a first for a U.S. wireless carrier, Sprint has announced new add-on features that would give a customer access to calling their home landline phone or their office phone (or switchboard) in an unlimited fashion without using wireless minutes. So, you can be a chatty cathy with your wife or husband and not pull from your minute "bucket". These add-ons cost $5 and $8 month respectively for calling to home or office.

This is made interesting by the fact that is has a monthly service charge - it would be a no-brainer if it were a free service made to trump the other carriers, but it's not. This appears to be a pretty good value, since it is unlimited calling to a pre-designated number. Here's a question for our readers: would a feature like this cause you to switch to Sprint for your wireless needs? Is this a pretty big value for most of you?

Reader Comments

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1. Seems like a good idea, but isn't this just an easy to copy feature that the other carriers will offer in a relative short amount of time? If so, why switch?

Posted at 11:48AM on Mar 9th 2006 by Todd

2. Good point - but, if you need this functionality *now* and want to save money immediately (say you call your office 20 times a day, like many salespeople do), it may make sense to take advantage of this rather neat feature with Sprint instead of waiting for the other carriers to copy it (sometime in the future), which I agree with: the other big carriers will probably copy this new Sprint feature. Look what happened to Nextel's PTT feature - Sprint copied that with the "Ready Link" service.

Posted at 12:04PM on Mar 9th 2006 by Brian

3. Sounds like a money-making scam to me.

If you're on Sprint, probability is that you're wife is on Sprint too, and probably the rest of your family. Though this is not always the case, it is often the case.

So, I'm paying extra money to call home even though my family is on the unlimited mobile-to-mobile already.

Next please.

Posted at 12:12PM on Mar 9th 2006 by Rick Dobbs

4. I wonder how hard it would be to develop a system allowing me to call home or office and interface with either 1) my pc 2) an asterisk pbx or 3) an office switchboard and automatically patch my calls through to an outside line.

I suppose I could effectively do away with cellular minutes all together.

Posted at 1:32PM on Mar 9th 2006 by Hal

5. Alltel has been doing this for FREE for at least 2 years. Any single land line may be designated as an unlimited free number to call or be called from for your "family" plan.

Posted at 6:02PM on Mar 17th 2006 by Hank vB

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