Vodacom Wi-Fi calling is live

Chris.Geerdts said:
Your Vodacom voice minutes are deducted. I'm sure your Wi-Fi usage is billed as per normal. Overseas will be a massive benefit (no need to go onto voice roaming) and if you battle with indoor voice coverage you will score too
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Yeah, it's standard for your voice minutes or airtime to be deducted but I'm skeptical about roaming... I know that Tmobile doesn't charge (other than minute/airtime deductions) when making a VoWiFi call from outside the US to the US but charges are still levied when making a call to a non-US country. Incoming calls are not charged though, which is a huge saving.

Vodacom could still charge a premium when making calls from another country.
 
The main thing for me is that this would help many people that is in a bad coverage area, but does have wifi at home. And of course if roaming is much less, then that would be a great too. My personal experience with public wifi though pretty much sucked so far ... but maybe it is better in 1st world countries.
 
But if you are at home on your own WiFi why would you use Vodacom and have minutes deducted for it, when you could simply have Skype, Hangouts, Whatapp etc instead?
 
SauRoNZA said:
But if you are at home on your own WiFi why would you use Vodacom and have minutes deducted for it, when you could simply have Skype, Hangouts, Whatapp etc instead?
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Dont forget, this is not just to make calls, but to receive them also. Lets take a Doctor for example that is on call. Is the nurse going to call him @ 00:00 on WhatsApp and tell him that his patient's pupils are blown and is unresponsive? No, she is going to call him on his normal number.
 
The technology deployed here is brand new and is aimed at using any possible spectrum to extend coverage basically. It's very early days for the 3GPP standards around this.

Ockie, krykor, etc. have explained above how it basically works, this is not the same as running an OTT app on your phone. It's part of the core of the phone and thus work exactly like the green button always has. So you can call anyone else, they don't need to have the same app as you have.

Think of it (quite correctly) as just adding another bearer to your mobile, from 2G (900/1800) to 3G (2100) to 4G (1800) to Wi-Fi.

So it's not the same as OTT VoIP and thus the term VoWiFi, though everyone is now beginning to use VoWiFi to describe their VoIP app, including AlwaysOn and Project Isizwe.

What's quite cool is that firmware for the S6 to do this was developed here in SA with Vodacom & Samsung.
 
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jannievanzyl said:
The technology deployed here is brand new and is aimed at using any possible spectrum to extend coverage basically. It's very early days for the 3GPP standards around this.

Ockie, krykor, etc. have explained above how it basically works, this is not the same as running an OTT app on your phone. It's part of the core of the phone and thus work exactly like the green button always has. So you can call anyone else, they don't need to have the same app as you have.

Think of it (quite correctly) as just adding another bearer to your mobile, from 2G (900/1800) to 3G (2100) to 4G (1800) to Wi-Fi.

What's quite cool is that firmware for the S6 to do this was developed here in SA with Vodacom & Samsung.
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Will you be rolling this out to Sony, Apple and others anytime soon?

How will the association to the wifi networks work - automated? Obviously there are some QoS issues here if you can use your own wifi
 
Apple already have Wifi calling, guess Vodacom would have to comply to whatever standards and interfacing is needed and then once testing completed, Apple at request will enable it? (Carrier Feature, it gets updated every so often eg hotspot)

PS. The reason you can't just say it should be free etc is that, much like standards with cellular network etc, the call is switched through carrier network asap and obviously there is the failovers & handovers to cellular etc which needs to happen.

I wonder if we will get improved voice in future with VoLTE etc I'm kinda getting use to the Whatsapp quality of calls hehehe
 
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krycor said:
Apple already have Wifi calling, guess Vodacom would have to comply to whatever standards and interfacing is needed and then once testing completed, Apple at request will enable it? (Carrier Feature, it gets updated every so often eg hotspot)

PS. The reason you can't just say it should be free etc is that, much like standards with cellular network etc, the call is switched through carrier network asap and obviously there is the failovers & handovers to cellular etc which needs to happen.

I wonder if we will get improved voice in future with VoLTE etc I'm kinda getting use to the Whatsapp quality of calls hehehe
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VoLTE and even VoWifi call quality is 10x better than Whatsapp and even HD Voice services.

The beauty of wifi calling is that you can be reached no matter where you are in the world without the need to roam. So if you are on prepaid and on wifi, someone can reach you as if you were roaming or on your home network. And its integrated into the Android Dialer. On some new versions of android you just need to enable it in settings.

We demo'ed wifi calling last year using a TMobile branded Motorola Smartphone. Sitting in offices in Sandton on a guest access wifi account, we called a local number and it routed through via the states. Worked perfectly.
 
MickeyD said:
Not technology bearer related... is there any financial benefit to the end-user?
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From what I understand, only when it comes to international roaming....possibly. This could be dependant on your mobile operator I assume. Will have to wait and see the details on that from Vodacom I guess.
 
Ockie said:
From what I understand, only when it comes to international roaming....possibly. This could be dependant on your mobile operator I assume. Will have to wait and see the details on that from Vodacom I guess.
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So other than those few subscribers who will benefit IF it does apply to international roaming, 99% of VodacomSA's subscribers will see no financial benefit?
 
MickeyD said:
So other than those few subscribers who will benefit IF it does apply to international roaming, 99% of VodacomSA's subscribers will see no financial benefit?
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Well, from what I have been reading about how other operators have implemented it, i doubt it .... but lets wait and see what Vodacom says when they give full product details.
 
will it automatically decide if your wifi is to slow? would this make do with a slower speed connection then whatsapp?
 
MickeyD said:
PS. from an engineering perspective this is brilliant!
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Except it's been done months ago by T-Mobile, Sprint and AT&T in the US alone. Smartone in HK and EE in the UK, and many other places.
So no, this isn't really something new.

Look at the phones these guys support - http://ee.co.uk/ee-and-me/network/wifi-calling and we get the S6 here with their custom Vodacom branded firmware that takes forever to get updates.
 
whatwhat said:
Except it's been done months ago by T-Mobile, Sprint and AT&T in the US alone. Smartone in HK and EE in the UK, and many other places.
So no, this isn't really something new.

Look at the phones these guys support - http://ee.co.uk/ee-and-me/network/wifi-calling and we get the S6 here with their custom Vodacom branded firmware that takes forever to get updates.
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Never said it was a SA first... :p
 
whatwhat said:
Except it's been done months ago by T-Mobile, Sprint and AT&T in the US alone. Smartone in HK and EE in the UK, and many other places.
So no, this isn't really something new.

Look at the phones these guys support - http://ee.co.uk/ee-and-me/network/wifi-calling and we get the S6 here with their custom Vodacom branded firmware that takes forever to get updates.
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I actually made those T-mobile calls months before you guys did. ;)

Problem with their solution (which is brilliant) is that it was absolutely world leading but proprietary. Basically now been superseded by 3GPP standards-based which all the handsets will automatically support. iPhone with IOS8 already does (now we just wait for the Orchard gods to decide when they relese it in ZA), other are developing their firmware quite fast now.

I've been running it on my S5 and S6 for a few months already.

Not a 'Vodafone branded' image at all, it's a generic Samsung image. Just developed together with Vodacom.
 
MickeyD said:
Never said it was a SA first... :p
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It is an SA first, actually. :) The standards only became available recently. All those other solutions were proprietary.

We could do it quite easily as we had everything in place for our VoLTE service. Needed the handset support.
 
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