MagicJack Announces New Femtocell to Allow Free Cell Phone Calls from Your Home

Ymax, the company behind the MagicJack (the nifty little devices that lets you make unlimited phone calls from your home, just like you had a landline) announced that it’s working on a similar technology that works with cell phones.

The MagicJack for cell phones (no official name yet) will cost you $40 up front with a yearly subscription of $20 (first year is free) and will work with any GSM cell phone, whether it’s locked or unlocked or currently subscribed to a cell phone plan or not. That means you can use your iPhone or Nexus One for free in your home and then hop back on your normal cell phone plan provider’s network when you’re out and about. And because the cell phone version of the MagicJack is essentially a miniature little cell phone tower, your calls will be crystal clear, too.

You might think a device like this might have cellular service providers anxious and up in arms. But really, it’s quite the opposite. Its unlikely that users will completely ditch their cell phone plans in favor of the new MagicJack femtocell and cellular service companies dealing with massive strain on their network will definitely welcome the opportunity to offload some  of its load. In fact, Verizon Wireless’s Network Extender and Sprint’s Airrave do just that, while T-Mobile’s decision to allow free HotSpot Home calling via WiFi was undoubtedly designed to lighten the load on its cell phone networks. AT&T has it’s own femtocell, the 3G Microcell which gives users unlimited calling via their home wireless networks, too. These services directly from the cell phone providers get relatively less attention, though, and are relatively more expensive than MagicJack’s proposed pricing.

What the MagicJack will really sound the death knell for is the landline, which was already on life support. But now that any old cell phone lying around your house can work as your home phone (and if you’re anything like us, you’ve got three or four old deactivated phones sitting in junk drawers), there’s even less reason to do it the old-fashioned way.

What do you think? Would you consider using a femtocell from MagicJack for free phone calls in your home?

P.S. Check out this video of MagicJack Vice Chairman Dr. Y.W. Sing talk about MagicJack for cell phones.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 7:27 am by Jack Busch and is filed under Cell Phones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.