It’s strange, but true. A lot of people use their cellphones at home even when the option to use a traditional land line is there. The old phones may not be very cool, but there’s no airtime, no minutes you have to keep track of. With a traditional phone you can make local calls and talk until the cows come home, never having to worry about going over your limit and racking up extra charges. And yet, many people prefer to keep chatting on their cellphones when at home. In many families, teens would rather die than be caught talking on their parents’ old phone and others have chosen to use their cell phone as their only line. Today Rogers and Fido have launched a new service called Fido UNO and Rogers Home Calling Zone that will help people use their cell phones at home without having to worry about airtime limits. In essence, they are combing both types of phone lines into one handset.

Ye Ol' Land Line, where local calls are free

Right now it is available only through the Nokia 6301 through Fido, and the Nokia 6086 from Rogers. Both companies will eventually expand to include other models. The phones are equipped to make calls both using a typical cellular connection and through a Wi-Fi connection, through high speed internet access. Just as you would with a laptop, you pair the phone up with your wireless broadband router. As long as you are in range of the router’s signal, the phone will handle calls using a high speed internet connection, and in so doing behave just like a traditional land line, meaning unlimited local calls and lower rates for long distance.

The Nokia 6301 is both a cellular and Wi-Fi phone

You can even maintain a call from one signal to the other. So as you travel through your day, the phone operates like a regular cell phone, airtime minutes ticking down. The moment you come home and enter the range of your wireless router, the phone will seamlessly switch over to the Wi-Fi connection, in mid-call even, and change over to the Wi-Fi plan. I’ve tested this out and it works. One moment it’s a cell phone, the next it’s an internet phone. There’s no dropped calls and, aside from seeing the on-screen icon in the upper left change from a cellular antennae to a pink Wi-Fi icon, you can barely hear the switch taking place.

The technology is called Unlimited Mobile Access (UMA) and although it has been in use in other countries, including the US, this is the first time it is being launched in Canada. The service costs $15 per month for local service, $20 per month Canada-wide, that’s on top of your regular cell phone plan, and the Nokia 6301 and 6086, the only phones that works with the service, are being sold for $50 and $25 on a three year contract. The idea is that you will save money by being able to reduce those cellphone charges from home and then by cancelling your old land line.

Linksys WRT54G-RGR Wireless Router optimized for voice calls

The package also includes a special Linksys 802.11g Wi-Fi router. Although it will work with any brand of Wi-Fi router, the model provided by Rogers has been optimized for voice calls and so provides better sound quality. Your phone calls will be clearer. The router has also been modified with an easy connect button. Once you go into the settings on the cell phone and set it to detect the router, you can press the easy connect button and the two devices will automatically share your network’s security code and connect. You don’t have to type in a long WEP code using the phone’s keypad. Once you’ve completed this set-up process, you never have to go through it again (that is unless there’s a power failure or similar incident).

There are a couple of interesting twists to the service. If you start a conversation at home, meaning with the phone in Wi-Fi mode and then leave your home so that the phone will switch over to its cellular mode, the entire conversation will still be billed as if it took place in Wi-Fi mode.

You can use the service with any Wi-Fi hotspot. Using the menu settings on the phone you can detect and connect to a Wi-Fi router at a friend’s, house, coffee shop, airport lounge, even the Wi-Fi connection at work, assuming the owner of the hotspot gives you their security code. You can even travel with the phone and/or the packaged router and use it in other cities across Canada. Wherever you connect the phone, it becomes a local line for that area. So if you live in Vancouver and travel to Montreal, connect the phone up to a hotel’s Wi-Fi access, you can now call anyone in Montreal as a local call.

You can use one Wi-Fi router to support multiple Nokia 6301 phones. So if you are a family of four and each of you decides to subscribe to this plan, you only need to have one Wi-Fi router in the household. All four handsets can connect and place calls at the same time. All four handsets will need to pay an individual $15/month fee.

So one advantage that the traditional phone still holds is the ability to share one line throughout a household, where when a call comes in it rings throughout the home and anyone can pick up. With the new UNO service from Rogers and Fido everyone will have their own individual line.

Since the service shares your internet connection with your home computer and laptops, it can suffer if you have a high amount of download traffic. If you are someone who has a computer set up to download movies, music, and TV shows in high volume, 24 hours, you can expect the quality of the calls made in Wi-Fi mode to suffer.

The service is limited only to voice calls. For tech fans this is going to hurt a lot of heads, but when you are using the Nokia handset in Wi-Fi mode, you can only use the internet connection for making voice calls. Data functions, such as text messaging, e-mails, and web surfing are still placed through the cellular network and so are subject to extra charges and limitations. Yes, it’s a phone with a Wi-Fi connection that you can’t use to surf the net, grab e-mails, or even send text messages. Rogers has hinted that this may change in the future.

One of the reasons Rogers has but one model of cellphone to use right now is that the Wi-Fi connection can be a drain on the battery, something that the Nokia 6301 (the model I've tested) appears to handle well. I haven’t had a chance to test the battery completely, but it’s worth noting that this will be an issue as Rogers tries to add this service to more handsets in the future.

Obviously one of the downsides is reliability as neither internet service or Wi-Fi connectivity can match a traditional phone line in remaining active at all times. Traditional phone lines rarely go down or suffer problems, even in black outs, while internet access and wireless connections can drop in speeds, sometimes on a whim depending upon interference from competing wireless signals.

All in all, the downsides are few and manageable and the service itself is a worthy investment and a clear advantage for Rogers in their efforts to compete against Bell and Telus. The only issue I see is how well it will perform as it is expanded across other handsets and whether Apple’s iPhone will be one of them.

Nokia 6301

Fido Canada

$50 for three years$150 for two years.

A fairly simple, candy bar shaped handset, the Nokia 6301 is a tri-band phone that comes packaged with a charging dock (so you can keep that battery going) which makes it easier to replace your cordless phone with. It has a sturdy body, includes a 2 megapixel camera and camcorder, Bluetooth on top of the Wi-Fi connection, accepts SD Micro cards (up to 2 GB), has a music player, FM stereo radio, and comes with a hands-free headset. You can use data services with it over EDGE, but the phone’s small form factor and simple keypad make that a little impractical. It’s a good little phone for making calls and taking casual pics, but cell phone junkies would do well to wait and see what else Rogers comes out with on their UNO plan.

Nokia 6086

Rogers Wireless

$25 for three years$170 for no contract.

More primitive than Fido's offering, this Nokia clamshell offers only the most basic features - MMS to send pictures, sound, or text messages, basic internet access, voice dialing, and vibration alert. If you're part of the generation that thinks using a traditional landline is not cool, you're not going to be impressed by this handset either.