Take the m9 home?

When you look at the market for DECT devices, actually most of them are sold into residential, especially in Europe but also in the United States DECT has become classic at home. However, practically all devise are using good-old POTS for the connection or ISDN if you are in Germany. Would it make sense to give home users an upgrade to use VoIP-based DECT at home?

The biggest problem of course is price. At Wal-Mart, they are selling DECT phones for 15 USD, and if you would put a 99 USD dollar VoIP-based phone next to it, people would ask themselves what’s the point? DECT handsets are pretty much talking endpoints, and that’s what you already get from POTS. Also, prices for POTS have fallen so much, that there is little point saving a few bucks for calls.

Of course, at home we are using m9 handsets and my wife does accept it. But the biggest point is that she has a lot of international calls, and because they are still expensive if you use telephone companies, that’s the point for us to use it at home. For regular national calls, we still have the 15 USD device with the POTS line that we got included in the internet package.

The other thing that we are doing is using the handset as PBX extension in the company. That’s another thing you can’t do when using POTS. DECT is great because I can walk around in the house and even outside without having to worry about loosing the connection. If I have to, I can easily transfer a call and there is no need to fork the call to the cell phone.

Competing on price will be impossible. I believe the biggest point is that I have a mobile PBX extension at home; then next to that my wife can talk for hours to people outside of the country; and seen from this perspective the m9 makes sense at home. I don’t think it makes sense to sell the m9 through Wal-Mart, for example. But I do believe it makes sense to point out to customers that they have the option and it does make their life easier when they work from home from time to time.