Anyone with Android and EE using Wi-Fi calling?

Associate
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So I have an iPhone 7S on EE and it works great with Wi-Fi calling - especially in my house that has poor reception. As soon as the phone sees the Wi-Fi, it enables and locks on Wi-Fi calling.

Now, I also have a Galaxy S7 on Vodafone with Wi-Fi calling enabled. However it doesn't work as well as the iPhone on EE. It will switch between the cellular network and Wi-Fi calling depending on the reception level of the cellular network. In practise this means while the signal varies between zero bars to 3 bars, the phone will get caught out and drop/miss calls.

So is this the way Wi-Fi calling works on Android, or the way Vodafone have implemented it?
 
Soldato
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Broken Hopes right I know both of these systems inside out by design and you've spotted their largest difference - priority. Wi-Fi calling is truly awful if you're a network engineer. You can't control the network, wifi in general is rubbish and consumer broadband is unreliable. If you use wifi you're adding on at least 150ms latency as well. It sounds good because Codecs are fantastic things but the latency is just rough. For this (and other) reasons (handover being a strong one - you can only hand over wifi calls to 4G), Vodafone have the priority for calls set to the following:

Use 4/2/3g for calling (in that order iirc)
Use WiFi if no other bearer is available for a period of time (the phones can identify the reliability etc... although this appears to be off for you unfortunately)

EE takes Wi-Fi as priority if available, simple as. Interestingly when businesses ask about Wi-Fi calling, EE often tell businesses not to use it if they don't have to (this is also in their sales literature).
 
Soldato
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EE also have the benefit of a full roll out of VoLTE, Vodafone won't support iPhones for VoLTE until 11.3 is released.
This is true and always struck me as one of the more bizarre choices of VF-UK. VoLTE is working on a number of other handsets currently. If you have diagnostics enabled on your phone you can see this on some more recent handsets (tariff dependant, more common on business tariffs) but it's not completely announced.

The latency is due to what's called tromboning, something you can minimise but is present in a call which uses Wi-Fi calling as it has to go through an internet facing gateway instead of the direct path like it would on a standard mobile call. If you like networky stuff it's fascinating but it's not exactly thriller material. Wikipedia's entry on it aint bad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tromboning but you will have to imagine that a server you must send all media through is sorta in the place where the SBC is on the diagram.

It's not something networks naturally want to talk about, especially when people think wifi calling is great (and for coverage it is - I am not dismissing this, it's fantastic) but if you listen to a coversation back on a wifi call vs a standard call you realise everyone has longer pauses, like they've had a drink or two or are thinking really carefully about their words etc... Our brains have filtered this out to a large degree (just like how your earpiece repeats what you're saying at 15% volume but you ignore it) but it's deffo there.
 
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