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Wifi and VOLTE calling on iPhone coming to EE first
exterra
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Fresh from the Apple iPhone announcement - Apple are working with 2 carriers to bring Wifi Calling with seamless handoff to Volte on 4G - T-Mob in the US and EE in the UK.
Bit of a coup for EE!
Bit of a coup for EE!
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GSM has the largest coverage and will have for years to come and that is featured on every handset on the market!
Progress of sorts I guess but just how many will be rushing to EE to take advantage of this?
Not really for customers...... for the networks perhaps but a voice call to the average punter is just that and most don't care what it is as long as the call is clear. The fact is that nobody is going to be making a purchase just to get VoLTE as it delivers nothing that any common feature phone does already.
I don't see people rushing to EE for this, but then again it's technology advancing, and all networks need to keep up.
VoLTE will let you use LTE data while on a phone call instead of dropping down to slower 3G, especially handy while tethering!
And that WiFi calling is awesome, being able to transition from wifi to your mobile network and stay on the call, it's better than Three's solution which would cause your call to drop if you leave wifi, even if you gain a network signal.
Nobody is going to make a purchase because of VoLTE. Well forget VoLTE then. The average consumer probably doesn't even need 4G for their day to day, let's just ditch the whole thing, 3G is fine as it is.
With that kind of mentality, things would never advance.
Three and EE will have it before Vodafone and O2.
A lot of people with iPhone 5, 5s and 5c's will be missed out
The UK compare page doesn't mention anything about VoLTE yet they said about EE, whether as the US/Global version does.
UK: http://imgur.com/XQTYfNZ
USA: http://imgur.com/cnofCJy
VoLTE is a very important, and long overdue, part of the LTE development that will finally make it possible to 'go the extra mile' with 4G roll out. However, if a lot of handsets can't use it, then that presents a problem in the short term.
It's not on O2, therefore it has no relevance to wavejock, he therefore thinks it's irrelevant to the entire country.
I wondered if the qualcomm baseband in the 5 and 5s handsets would need to be updated, and if that is remotely risky to bricking the phone then Apple wouldn't do it in the field.
at least we will get wifi calling
Native support for wifi calling is a better solution though as you won't end up with two separate SMS histories and the seamless handoff from wifi to cellular is something standalone apps can't do either.
As for VoLTE it should help indoor voice coverage for the likes of Three as they have access to lower frequencies for LTE which should offer improved building penetration.
EE has already said it's working on it, but presumably without a date Apple wouldn't say anything. Just as has happened with previous releases where there was a delay before a device was confirmed as working on a particular network.
It may well be early 2015 anyway, but it's certainly good to have a phone that's ready and then be told later on that you'll get this new service. EE and Three need to start rolling out their 800MHz service anyway, so there's no major harm in the delay.
Anandtech has the technical detail as usual.
I read last week that Apple would use the 9x25 as there was unreliable yields of the very new Cat 6 chip from Qualcomm. The 9x25 is available in volume and supports CA but only a top speed of 150Mbps thus Cat 4.
I guess when you're Apple you have to plan to sell a metric ton :-)
More on the MDM9x25:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6541/the-state-of-qualcomms-modems-wtr1605-and-mdm9x25/3
Probably not as Apple probably haven't enabled the firmware to do that. Plus I imagine by the time Three looks at CA the 2300MHz LTE auctions will be upon us. Interesting enough the models we are getting of the iPhone 6 in UK will support that frequency.
I was thinking more along the lines of the Cat 4 150Mb/s limit. EE/Vod are playing with CA but that takes them beyond 150Mb/s since they can already do Cat 4 without CA. So having CA that only goes up to Cat 4 wouldn't be much use for EE/Vod.
You are right about the bands. Just had a look and it does support a load of LTE bands. Also has TDD 2600 (band 38) which some UK networks have.