So T-Mobile’s latest campaign is to take better advantage of WiFi, quickly hopping on the bandwagon with the new iPhone’s capabilities in the unapologetically aggressive, quick-footed manner that T-Mobile has specialized in since John Legere took over. All I can say is that it’s about time somebody did.
Why it is that my smartphone’s WiFi connection can deliver any number of complicated data streams to me yet be like oil and water with my voice calls is beyond me. For that matter, why VoLTE has been so long is coming is puzzling as well. It’s not really that hard to integrate the worlds of voice and data is it? I mean we’ve been doing it on wires for a decade now right? And Skype’s been doing it over WiFi for years anyway.
On the other hand, perhaps the real problem is that despite the plethora of hotspots out there, it’s always such a pain to connect to a new one – especially those with a secondary login. And when it doesn’t work, there’s little recourse. I suppose wireless carriers don’t want to deal with that extra baggage if they don’t have to, and their voice coverage generally isn’t the one straining their infrastructure.
At some point here though, the various ways to connect to the same infrastructure need to work together better. Too many people out there don’t use WiFi to supplement their connectivity simply because it’s not seamlessly integrated. The moves by Apple and T-Mobile may be mostly hand-waving at this point relative to the grand scheme of things, but perhaps it will eventually lead to having all our bandwidth work together in true harmony someday.
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Categories: Internet Traffic · Wireless
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Nomadic Voice over WiFi (or VoIP in general) is easy and straight forward now. Its the seamless transition between AP’s of active mobility that increases the complexity to the LTE level. Attempting and failing to replicate this voice mobility function was the doom of WiMax.
Until Verizon and AT&T are done starving out every single ounce of spectrum available, they want to continue using voice as a separate platform and architecture at the local level. This keeps them out of trouble with the unions and puts enough traffic over their SWC-based local infrastructure to continue funding maintenance on it.