Does an iPhone 6 on T-Mobile place calls over WiFi?

by philg

Folks:

I’ve got a Verizon Samsung Note 3 that has tortured me for months with a Contacts manager that thinks the best results when searching for “Bob” are (1) people not named Bob, (2) people for whom only an email address is available (i.e., I couldn’t call them if I wanted to). I also can’t get over the fact that voicemail is not integrated. My final verdict on the Note 3 is that it is a good tablet but a terrible phone (due purely to software; I don’t mind the size even when using it as a phone).

Separately, I am spending a lot of time in a new suburban house where the Verizon coverage is non-existent. I don’t think other carriers will be much better because this is an area where people tend to obstruct the construction of towers. However, I notice that T-Mobile phones are programmed to be able to make calls over a WiFi connection.

So I’m wondering if I can solve two problems with one purchase: a T-Mobile iPhone 6 Plus. Has anyone tried using this over WiFi on a regular basis? How well does it work? (This review is positive.)

Any other general comments from people who’ve switched from Verizon to T-Mobile?

[I did make some phone calls to Verizon. It started out with them asserting that the coverage at the house’s address should be great. Then they tried to sell me a “range extender” (i.e., make the customer pay for using the network every month and also to build the network and backhaul the traffic). I asked the tech support guy what the range extender had to be plugged into and he said “nothing.” The wall for power? No. An Internet router for communications? No. It could just be placed on a coffee table and would magically make the service in the house better? Yes. (As you might expect, the box actually does plug into the wall for power and into a router for Internet but it also needs a view of the sky so that it can get GPS location; VZ doesn’t trust the customer to enter the home address I think.) Did the fact that the Verizon FiOS installer couldn’t use his own mobile phone standing in the driveway convince them? That’s a different department. Instead of taking my word for it/their own employee’s word, they opened a trouble ticket and paid someone to drive out there. The person reported back to them that there was no coverage. Verizon then closed the trouble ticket without texting, emailing, or calling me. I called back a month later and they are now offering to send me a range extender at no charge but they don’t have any in stock. If it works, I might be about to stay on the VZ network though I am thinking that the ability to make calls over WiFi might be useful in other folks’ houses who also have poor signal.]

20 thoughts on “Does an iPhone 6 on T-Mobile place calls over WiFi?”

  1. I don’t know about iPhone 6 and the link to the review you provided for T-Mobile is very cool (T-Mobil’s “Wi-Fi Unleashed” feature).

    I can tell you that my wife uses both http://www.viber.com and http://www.tango.me [1] to make calls over Wi-Fi to families and friends overseas — both work great with no issues. The drawback with those two apps is the other party must also have the app installed on his / her phone (or computer) and must also have Wi-Fi. If you want to use the app to make a call to a land-line or a number that doesn’t have the app, you can for a cost.

    Looks like T-Mobile has once again shaken the cellular market with there “Wi-Fi Unleashed”. Good for them.

    [1] I dislike both of those apps because they very much take over your phone by adding contacts to your contact of anyone who calls you via their app. It also scans your contact list and adds them to it’s contact list with no option for you to opt out.

  2. I’m on T-Mobile with an Android phone and the wifi calling works great. I use it at home all the time as we don’t even have a landline. Assuming the iPhones support wifi calling I wouldn’t expect you to have any problems.

  3. T-mobile wifi calls work great. However, 6plus is not for people that wear their phones in pants pocket, it is prone to screen bending issues.

  4. > but it also needs a view of the sky so that it can get GPS location; VZ doesn’t trust the customer to enter the home address I think.

    Actually, they need GPS to get an accurate source of time, so that the picocell can be temporally synchronised with the rest of the network (which is e.g. necessary for the handset to roam off of a regular network cell and onto the picocell as you walk down your driveway and lose regular cell service, without causing interference).

  6. “….they are now offering to send me a range extender at no charge…”

    Wait, what? I’ve put up with crummy VZW reception at our house for years, but balked at $250 for the extender. So if you complain about lousy coverage, they’ll cough up one for free? Curious to hear if the box shows up when (if) it comes in stock.

  7. I have the MicroCell from AT&T installed in my house. With the iPhone 4, 4s, 5 and 5s it worked fine. I do not yet have a 6. The switch from outside network to MicroCell is seamless when you come home and often drops the call as you leave. I would say it is not a well-thought out or well-designed or well-support product. It could still solve your issue if it is similar to the Verizon offering (which it probably is).

  8. By the way, if you spend any time on the MIT campus, it’s a mostly dead zone for T-mobile, especially indoors. My daughter had to switch because of this and I’ve seen it from personal experience when I’ve visited.

    In general, Verizon is usually considered to have the best network coverage and T-mobile is among the worst, but YMMV depending on the towers in your neighborhood. Before you switch carriers, you should make sure you are not going out of the frying pan and into the fire.

    The cell network was not originally built to serve the interior of suburban houses – you were supposed to have your land line for that. And given the “anti-tower” mentality, it hasn’t gotten much better. In my area there was a big “no cell tower” campaign in one neighborhood a number of years ago, with lawn signs and a web site, etc. – you would think that they wanted to build a toxic waste dump and not something that would be extremely useful to the very people who were opposing it. Some claimed to be afraid of radiation, which makes zero sense because the cell phone (which all of these people use) that you hold two inches from your brain emits a field hundred of times more powerful than a tower that is miles away (the power decreases according to the square of the distance). Cell towers are very low powered anyway because the whole concept of cell service is that you can re-use the same frequencies over and over throughout a metropolitan area – high power would defeat that.

    There is a 1996 Federal law that is suppose to prevent local government from completely blocking towers but they are still allowed to “regulate” them by zoning ordinance which still enables them to give the cell phone co’s a hard time – getting approval for a single tower can take two years and cost $50,000 in legal fees. So you get fewer of them than you otherwise would.

  9. I use WiFi calling often on a iPhone 5s that I keep as a second phone for development/testing. It works just as advertised. The downside to T-Mobile is outside of metro areas there is often no signal or voice only. My main phone is iPhone 6+ on Verizon and it will have often have service when T-mobile gives me nothing. With all the traveling you seem to do I wouldn’t leave Verizon.

  10. T-Mobile’s coverage is much better than popular opinion would suggest, which I think reflects the state of their network a few years ago. Urban and suburban coverage are quite good; rural coverage is probably worse than Verizon’s still.

    Wi-fi calling on the iPhone 6 series works flawlessly. The phone figures out whether the network connection is suitable (bandwidth, latency, connectivity) and switches to Wi-Fi when it’s useful to do call. Calls correctly roam from cellular network to wi-fi and back, which has historically been a problem with femtocell solutions.

  11. I switched from Verizon on an iPhone 4s to T-Mobile on an iPhone 6. I went to both components of the latter explicitly because of the Wi-Fi Calling feature. It works fine. As you likely know, T-Mobile is currently the only U.S. carrier to implement Wi-Fi calling.

    I have a Verizon Network Extender. It worked OK but sometimes the phone needed nudging (Wi-Fi off/on) to pick up the Extender’s “cell” signal when I arrived at home. Also, its range for that pick up is less than Wi-Fi range.

    Along with the phone and carrier switch I got a T-Mobile CellSpot Router. It’s based on the ASUS RT-AC68U ($200 retail), a high-end dual band Wi-Fi router that is claimed to have a built-in firmware mod to provide preference to Wi-Fi call traffic in cases of simultaneous video streaming, etc. The router is available to post-paid T-Mobile customers for free with a $25 deposit, or to others for $99.

    I bought a “Verizon” iPhone 6 as “device only” for $649 (16G model) + tax at an Apple Store. It seems that AT&T/Verizon/T-Mobile models are all the same except for SIM, but I wasn’t *positive* that the AT&T and T-Mobile models have CDMA radios so I got the Verizon one for maximum future flexibility. I removed its Verizon-logo’d SIM before powering it on, and took it to a T-Mobile store for a SIM, activation, and the router.

  12. P.S. The full-price “device only” iPhones are unlocked. You can’t get the Verizon or AT&T versions from Apple online — only at an Apple Store.

  13. Phil,

    I bought the range extender that Verizon offers. It is made by Samsung,
    It helped minimally in the beginning but over time it actually made things worse as far as cell reception goes.
    I called Verizon and then Samsung and was told that due to my internet company’s lackluster system, the range extender would not work properly.
    End result: I threw away $200.

  14. Check out StraightTalk service from Walmart. It uses either T-mobile or AT&T service for roughly half the monthly service fee, no contract. They have a bring your own phone(BYOP) starter kit for $60 which includes an assortment of SIM cards and one months unlimited service.

  16. Just got a T-Mo iPhone 6, and there’s a toggle (defaults to off) for wifi calling. I turned it on since signal’s not great at home. It seems to work.

  17. >rural coverage is probably worse than Verizon’s still.

    Last year I had occasion to drive cross country from Seattle to Phila. T-mobile had zero coverage in many places in the West. Entire states (Montana) were “dead zones”. Not just for 3 or 4G – no service at all. Verizon will at least try to shoot coverage down the interstate corridors but T-mobile had nada, even on the highway. Compare the Verizon and T-mobile coverage maps in the West and you will see. Now you may not visit Billings, Montana very often, but if you break down on the interstate there your T-mobile phone will be worthless.

    Also, T-mobile’s map is, shall we say, a little on the “optimistic” side. They show all of Cambridge, MA as being “excellent” – their highest rating, while I can tell you for a fact that many parts of the MIT campus have NO coverage or 1 bar at best. If this is their idea of “excellent” I hate to think what their “satisfactory” areas are like. In fact, their map claims almost 100% coverage inside the I-495 belt – again I have trouble believing that.

  18. Sounds like you want an iPhone, but otherwise I would suggest Republic Wireless (mentioned in the Mossberg review). You only have the choice of 3 Android Motorola phones, but their key technology is wifi calling. Judging by their forums, they have the bugs out. It defaults to Sprint when you move out of wifi range.

    I don’t really want T-mobile as a regular cell phone, since my house and 1/3 of the drive home are dead spots. (wifi calling would work at home, but not on the commute)

  19. About the first problem, while in the Contacts screen, choose Settings from the context menu, then select the “Only contacts with phone numbers” check box.

  20. I cannot comment on the IPhone WiFi calling specifically, but this T-Mobile feature has been great for me – used it on several T-Mobile branded Samsung phones. I have a Nexus 5 now and miss it a lot (though Vonage and Viber do help.)

    Agree that T-Mobile coverage has a worse perception than reality.

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