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HANOVER, GERMANY -- T-Mobile International will start offering a converged Wi-Fi and cellular service this summer, using network equipment from Nortel Networks, Nortel announced at CeBIT.

The service will first become available in Germany, said Husam Azrak, a T-Mobile spokesman.

T-Mobile customers will be able to use laptops and PDAs to use services such as video calling, video conferencing, and IM even as they move between Wi-Fi and cellular networks. Their connections won't be dropped as they move between the networks and the customer can use one phone number to be reached regardless of which network they are near, Nortel said.

Customers will be able to connect to any of the 6000 T-Mobile and T-Com hotspots in Germany, which cover train stations, cafes, and other locations. They won't, however, be able to use the service via other hotspots such as those in homes or offices, Azrak said.

The companies are demonstrating the capability, which will work over 3G, EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution), GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), and Wi-Fi, at CeBIT.

The service will be geared toward business customers who will be able to use the service to access enterprise applications, T-Mobile said.

Additional Options

In addition to PC cards and converged handsets, users will also be able to connect using laptops from Fujitsu-Siemens Computers that come with embedded Wi-Fi and the high-speed HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) technology, Azrak said. The laptops are expected to become commercially available in the second quarter.

Users will be able to choose from different pricing models including an existing tariff that costs $42 per month plus an additional $1.20 per day of actual use. The plan limits downloads to 5GB on the cellular network and 200 hours of use on the Wi-Fi network, Azrak said.

Operators and vendors have been discussing such converged services recently but few have been commercially launched yet. BT Group has a service in the U.K. that allows users to roam from a cellular network onto a Wi-Fi network but it's limited only to the user's home Wi-Fi network.

BT and others support a UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access), a technology geared toward enabling mobile operators to offer converged services. T-Mobile's system will be based on SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), an open standard that can also be used to deliver converged services.

T-Mobile operates hotspots around the globe so this service could combine T-Mobile's cellular and Wi-Fi networks. T-Mobile already offers customers the T-Mobile MDA Pro, a PDA that includes both Wi-Fi and cellular.

For more coverage from the world's largest technology show, go to our CeBIT News page.