Wirelessnorth.ca

The word is out that Rogers will shortly be launching the 2nd gen blackberry pearl 8120 with wifi including the ability to make calls over wifi. The rogers wifi plan is similar to the T-mobile @home wifi service in the US. We snapped these pictures of T-mobile promo material in a T-mobile store in San Francisco earlier this year.

How does wifi calling work? When in range of a hotspot, your phone will route calls over the local wifi network instead through a rogers cell tower. The advantage to Rogers is that it relieves load from their network, savings which they in theory then pass on in some proportion to the subscriber. For subscribers the rumour is that the calls over wifi also sound noticeably better. Presumably with bandwidth to spare on Wifi, carriers can do with a little less compression than applied to standard mobile voice channels.

As long as you don’t leave the house too much, wifi also means finally a non-insane way to affordably transfer or stream data to a Rogers blackberry, and at good speeds as well.

One downside is that reportedly battery life suffers when enabling wifi on the blackberrry 8120.

Open questions remain: do you need to replace your home router? will it work with Rogers hotspots across the country? [tipsters out there let us know]

And if you want to know how Rogers service stack up to T-Mobile’s:

 
Yep, not a bad service but a year later at twice the price. that’s the state of competition in the Canadian wireless industry for you.