Stop whining, MTN and Telkom

[uchoose]

Some company one day will bring a WiFi only phone. So many hotspots around these days, mall of the south shopping centre will open with free wifi throughout in September. Other shopping centres will follow, then the small centres will follow. If they try and block the centres use a VPN. At least 50% of your day you are probable near wifi.

 

[Nod]

I think the biggest issue is the investment that operators make in their network.
Currently, they still have to support 2G, which takes up valuable spectrum, and hold the network back from expanding at a speed it could.
If the network could evolve quicker to 4G/LTE, then we would be able to use VoLTE and SMSoIP much quicker. VoLTE is basically SIP and SMSoIP is basically like whatsapp. The network would then also be better suited to these kind of traffic, as everything would be IP.

We are unfortunately not in the same position as Telstra AU where they could switch off their 2G network by end of 2016. We have too many low-cost devices in the network that runs on 2G/Edge.

It is never cheap or a simple matter to run two types of networks alongside each other, never mind trying to make them work together seamlessly all the time.

 

[Nod]

Some company one day will bring a WiFi only phone. So many hotspots around these days, mall of the south shopping centre will open with free wifi throughout in September. Other shopping centres will follow, then the small centres will follow. If they try and block the centres use a VPN. At least 50% of your day you are probable near wifi.

You do have VoWifi solutions out there. This enables MNOs to offload voice and data to wifi. So you are basically just hopping onto wifi, just like your phone would go from 3G to LTE. The problem is that wifi networks are generally not there for this kind of service, but mostly for a company/hotel to make money from the data they sell.