AT&T WiFi Calling Now Available for Some iOS 9 Users

[chriscrowlee]

I wasn't able to use this on my iPhone 6 until I dealt with about 6 people from AT&T side. (I purchased unlocked "tmobile" phone and put old AT&T sim inside.

Apparently the 9th and 10th digit of SIM card must be >= 27 to support VoLTE. Mine was not, they sent me a new SIM in mail and I was able to get it setup ~48hours of discovering that issue (since I didn't want to go deal with the sales people at the store)

You're not missing much. Their deployment of it is MUCH different than TMO. I have a TMO iPhone 6s and an ATT iPhone 6s, and TMO's is 100000x better. Theirs is wifi-first in priority, so anytime you have internet, it just works, and it doesn't care about your location... on a plane over Sri Lanka, it works. In a train in the fields of eastern France, it works. In a hotel room in Sydney, yep. Same experience for voice\text\imessage as home.

ATT... LOL, not so much. Once you leave the US, the geo-location figures it out... no more Wifi calling for you. Now of course there are ways to trick it, but the idea is they don't want that... And there are ways to force it to wifi, but they don't want it. Yet another example of how ATT is trying to send the industry back to 1999, like their typical employee's mindset seems to be stuck.

 

[gwhizkids]

Does anyone have the wifi option available on an iPhone 5S with the released version of iOS 9? If so, where is it located?

Not going to be available for the 5s apparently, though I can't get anyone to give a good reason why (yes, I'm aware that AT&T requires VOLTE, but that was their decision; the phone can do wifi calling without VOLTE).

 

[gsmornot]

Not going to be available for the 5s apparently, though I can't get anyone to give a good reason why (yes, I'm aware that AT&T requires VOLTE, but that was their decision; the phone can do wifi calling without VOLTE).

Guessing but I think it comes down to less hassle on their part. Supporting (telling) everyone with a phone unable to hand-off why their call drops every time they leave WiFi would get old. As you know, VoLTE is a requirement for the hand-off from Wifi to cell and if the 5s can't do this the call will drop and that alone would get old for the user. A new group of people would appear wanting to know why the feature was offered in the first place if they knew the call would drop when WiFi was weak. I'm guessing here and not trying to be rude but this is what I think it came down to in the end. Just easier not to offer the service if the whole service cannot meet the full list of requirements.

It's my feeling that it would be offered if they could find a way to deal with this detail. The more people that have access to the features the more customers they have that are wanting to be on the plans.

 

[sjn419]

I wasn't able to use this on my iPhone 6 until I dealt with about 6 people from AT&T side. (I purchased unlocked "tmobile" phone and put old AT&T sim inside.

Apparently the 9th and 10th digit of SIM card must be >= 27 to support VoLTE. Mine was not, they sent me a new SIM in mail and I was able to get it setup ~48hours of discovering that issue (since I didn't want to go deal with the sales people at the store)

I have an unlocked phone I bought from apple and a sim with those digits and mine still won't work :/

 

[gwhizkids]

Guessing but I think it comes down to less hassle on their part. Supporting (telling) everyone with a phone unable to hand-off why their call drops every time they leave WiFi would get old. As you know, VoLTE is a requirement for the hand-off from Wifi to cell and if the 5s can't do this the call will drop and that alone would get old for the user. A new group of people would appear wanting to know why the feature was offered in the first place if they knew the call would drop when WiFi was weak. I'm guessing here and not trying to be rude but this is what I think it came down to in the end. Just easier not to offer the service if the whole service cannot meet the full list of requirements.

It's my feeling that it would be offered if they could find a way to deal with this detail. The more people that have access to the features the more customers they have that are wanting to be on the plans.

I suspect you are 100% correct. Too bad for us on older devices, but actually understandable.