The feature is useful when customers find themselves in an area with weak or no carrier coverage.
Verizon will bring Wi-Fi calling this week to some customers with Android smartphones, making it the last major US carrier to offer the wireless network feature.
Verizon said Friday it would push out a software update on December 8 that will allow owners of Samsung's Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge to make and receive calls using a Wi-Fi network. The feature is useful whenever customers find themselves in an area with weak or no carrier coverage.
Yes, it's useful. Very, very, useful. Especially when (depends on carrier) you can use WiFi in, say, a Lisbon, Portugal, coffeeshop to make a call that looks, sounds like [a], and is billed like.. like it's a domestic US one.
However: [a] WiFi is NOT as reliable a voice communications channel as a (pseudo-dedicated) direct cellular channel. You're competing with all the other users at that coffeeshop, so there's potential for lots of dropoust, jitter, etc.
- If you have the _option_ of using WiFi _or_ cellular as _your_ choice, it's great. But... I've seen phones and carriers where the default is to try a WiFi conection and it takes a specific effort to turn WiFi off.
Samsung Galaxy S6 phones (at least mine on T-Mobile) have the option to turn Wi-Fi Calling on or off (independently of turning Wi-Fi on or off). Obviously Wi-Fi Calling doesn't work if Wi-Fi is turned off or there's no Wi-Fi in range. The Wi-Fi Calling icon shows up in the status bar if Wi-Fi Calling is available (turned on, Wi-Fi turned on, in range and connected, Wi-Fi has internet access, carrier reachable, etc.)
The default setting for Wi-Fi Calling is ON and Prefer Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi Calling is one of the Quick Settings on the Notification Panel (although you might have to scroll to the left to see it) so turning it on and off is pretty fast (along with things like Wi-Fi, Sounds, and Do Not Disturb). If you don't like it, turn it off once and leave it off. You can still use Wi-Fi.
It also has a 3-way choice for calls: Prefer Wi-Fi (fall back to Cellular), Prefer Cellular Network (fall back to Wi-Fi), and Never Use Cellular Network (even if it's available - perhaps good if you're travelling outside your home country where roaming is very expensive. You'll also need to do something about data roaming). If you want Never Use Wi-Fi for Calls, turn Wi-Fi Calling off. The notification panel contains a notification that Wi-Fi Calling will be used when it's ready, and if you tap it, it's a shortcut to the
3-way choice.
Wi-Fi Calling does some incidental checks so it won't engage if it's a no-go from the start: if you're connected with the right Wi-Fi password (if needed), but it can't get DNS from the Internet and/or reach it to register with T-Mobile (or whoever your carrier is), it won't try to use Wi-Fi Calling. I had to do a little fiddling with my paranoid firewall on my home network to make Wi-Fi Calling work. I've encountered a couple of public Wi-Fi sites where Wi-Fi calling didn't even start up (firewall for web surfing only?).
As near as I can tell, there's no option to independently select Wi-Fi *incoming* calls differently from Wi-Fi *outgoing* calls.
T-Mobile says that if you have Voice Over LTE, calls can migrate between Wi-Fi and the cellular network. I'm not sure whether this works on the Galaxy S6 and my service area. The Galaxy S6 has an option at Phone > Keyboard > More > Settings > Voice over LTE Settings. You can use VoLTE if available or turn it off. I have left it on, seeing no particular reason to turn it off now. You might want to turn it off to avoid calls migrating from Wi-Fi to expensive cellular in a foreign country.
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