In all of the hoopla over the new iPhone 6/Plus, T-Mobile in the US and EE in the UK got themselves a pretty big exclusive (for now). T-Mobile has been offering Wifi calling for years but it’s recently come to the iPhone – and with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, gets even better with cell/wifi handover. (T-Mobile partnered with Gogo to enable texting and voicemails on participating airline journeys as well).
Wifi calling, for some, may be they type of feature that makes or breaks a carrier relationship. With it, you can make calls anywhere there is a wifi signal. That means basements, country homes and even foreign countries are all now open to making and receiving calls from your carrier phone number…
This isn’t just any call quality either. This is HD voice (if the other party also has it) and it sounds as good as any call you’ve ever made on your mobile device. Calls into Google Voice and Skype also sound pretty amazing.
The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus and the latest Android phones even have radios that allow a handoff between Wifi and Cell towers so that if you are coming home from work and happen to go into your basement your call won’t drop. The radios on the iPhone 5/s/c won’t hand off, you’ll need to redial. For a family like mine, this is the type of feature that will allow us to cut the copper POTS line once and for all. Not only was our basement off limits, but so was the back side of my house which included my office.
T-Mobile sent me their ‘free’ (read: $25 deposit that you’ll never want back) Personal CellSpot Router which actually is just an ASUS AC1900 Router with some T-Mobile stickers and a T-Mobile branded firmware. You have to be a T-Mobile customer to get one of these and frankly at a retail price of $200, it is a pretty compelling offer (read: no-brainer). To be clear, you don’t need this router to make Wifi calls: Wifi calling works over any wifi connection. But T-Mobile wants you to have the best router out there. It is hard to find more gushing reviews than you do from this one.
The specs on the AC1900 router from ASUS:
Up to 1900 Mbps, 802.11AC(1300Mbps over 5G) + 802.11N(600Mbps over 2.4G). Broadcom TurboQAM™ technology increases wireless-N data rate to600 Mbps for 33% faster performance
1 x Gigabit WAN port, 4 x Gigabit LAN ports, 1 x USB3.0/1 x USB 2.0 support Printer/HDD/(3G/4G dongle) sharing.
AiRadar with Beam forming technology to ensure maximum WiFi coverage. Dual-core processor for fast and responsive performance with Wi-Fi, Ethernet and USB devices.
AiCloud to bring you multimedia sharing from outside network and Smartphone
Enhanced ASUSWRT interface for Easy 3steps setup through Tablet, Smartphone and PC
I didn’t have time to benchmark everything about the router, but it if you’ve ever configured a non-Airport wireless router, it is pretty easy to set up. The web interface:
T-Mobile said they’ve done some fine-tuning on the router to help with QoS (to make sure phone call packets get the highest priority). This means that if your router is saturated with Netflix/Gaming/YouTube/Torrent/etc traffic, your calls will still sound as good as always. From the web interface, the configuration looked standard (below) and I wonder whether it screws up T-Mobile’s behind the scenes QoS stuff if you mess around with this.
I didn’t try. Some of you might be concerned that T-Mobile may use your connection to hook up your neighbors with service. T-Mobile told me that currently, there is no plan to do so. You have to let people on your Wifi to do this. If T-Mobile did something like this in the future, you could throw your router in a box and send it back to get your $25 back, but I genuinely don’t think it is a concern.
So I didn’t actually try this on an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus because mine is somewhere between here and China. But T-Mobile was nice enough to send along a LG Flex (jeez, that thing is huge) which has the same type of handoff radios as the iPhone 6/6 Plus have.
I can report that the radios work as advertised. I was able to make a call from down the street and walk into my house (where the phone picked up the Wifi of the ASUS router) and continue the call as I lost T-Mobile service in our downstairs bathroom. It all works pretty seamlessly and you can pretty much “set it and forget it.” Except you don’t even really have to set it.
I’ll update this post once I get my iPhone 6 with some screenshots of how that works.
Wrap-up:
If you are a T-Mobile customer, go ahead and drop the refundable $25 on this router. It is worth it. It is likely stronger than your current router and will extend your signal not just for Wifi calling but also for other devices in your house. It can even be combined with an Airport (though I’m not sure the extra hop is worth the signal strength improvement). The ASUS AC1900 is a top-of-the-line wireless router that gamers and other high end wireless users often pay $200 for even if they aren’t using the Wifi calling.
As far as T-Mobile’s Wifi calling feature, it is one of those “game changers,” and as cliché as it sounds, yet another example of John Legere’s T-Mobile cornering the market on carrier innovation. Sprint and AT&T have already promised Wifi calling in the future but as we know, carriers often take their time when enabling features. AT&T for instance disgracefully took years to implement Apple’s built in Wifi hotspot and even disabled Facetime for many customers while it “figured out” the built-in IP technology.
I’m not oblivious to the fact that T-Mobile’s network isn’t as widespread as Verizon or AT&T. It clearly isn’t. But by opening up their network to Wifi calling early and indeed pioneering the practice and indeed forcing the other carriers to do so, T-Mobile has in many ways evened the coverage playing field and, more importantly, done right by their customers.
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