At Voice Over WLAN News, Glenn Fleishman picks up on a New York Times report that T-Mobile has launched converged cell/Wi-Fi services in Seattle. "It's in my own backyard, but I haven't seen it yet!" Fleishman complains.

Fees for the service are $20 on top of your cell phone's basic voice plan. The service, somewhat clunkily called T-Mobile HotSpot @Home, requires one of two dual-mode handsets as well as a T-Mobile router, and permits Wi-Fi roaming onto the T-Mobile HotSpot network.

"The requirement of a specific router relates to the low-power mode of handsets that needs a particular protocol embedded in the router to work -- WMM Power Save," Fleishman writes. "Few routers have this right now, but it's really a protocol-level feature, not a hardware change."

No word yet on when or if the service will expand beyond Seattle.

More here from ZDNet ... here from ComputerWorld ... and here from Unstrung.