Some interesting stats coming out from T-Mobile USA today. Mostly to do with WiFi Calling and VoLTE. WiFi Calling has been a feature of T-Mobile for quite some time. It allows you to place calls on a WiFi network instead of T-Mobile’s network, which makes it easier to get calls through, especially if you’re in an area that doesn’t have great coverage. “WiFi Calling is used by customers that see benefit from it, and we have over 7 million customers using it, and they are quite happy with it, but we never expect all our customers to use it,” said Grant Castle, T-Mobile’s VP of Engineering Services and QA in an interview with Light Reading. “The people who use it, it’s very successful. It’s something that’s a good part of our solution. It isn’t one of these things where we have to push everyone to it for capacity. It’s for the customer, not us.”
You may remember that at an Uncarrier event last fall, T-Mobile made a big push for WiFi Calling, bringing that feature to all of their devices, even the Nexus 6 (although that OTA still hasn’t hit). At the same event, T-Mobile also started giving out their own routers to customers, which works as a tower for T-Mobile. Since you can use WiFi Calling. I have one, and it’s amazing, it’s almost doubled the speed I get from Comcast.
Many critics have said that T-Mobile introduced WiFi Calling to help with coverage. As most of you know, T-Mobile doesn’t have the best coverage, especially indoors. However, T-Mobile does have over 260 million people covered with LTE, and that will greatly increase soon when their 700MHz spectrum gets integrated and built out.
Castle also spoke about their VoLTE network, and said that roughly 10% of their calls are made on VoLTE. That’s actually quite surprising, considering only a handful of phones and a handful of markets support VoLTE from T-Mobile right now. Although we should see a bunch more added pretty soon. Castle stated that it’s slowly growing and is going to accelerate pretty quickly. Which sounds accurate. He stated that it’s mostly due to handset adoption, and the iPhone and Samsung are leading the way there.