Sunday, October 25, 2015
Wifi calling... What does this mean for our phone bills?
AT&T and Verizon have pensioned the FCC to start testing wifi connected calls for cell phones. Though there are currently apps that allow you to call using a wifi connection on iOS devices, you can only do so however if the person you are calling has the same app. What this new wifi calling feature will do is when you're connected to a wifi hotspot and make a phone call, it will use the wifi signal instead of accessing your data usage. So what will this latest innovation mean for the network industry? Will prices for wifi hotspots go up or will there just be an abundance of them? And will consumers be able to reduce their data usage plans? If you're always connected to wifi theres no real need to pay the $100 a month for the XXL data usage plan!http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/25/9611746/verizon-wi-fi-calling-feature-seeks-fcc-approval
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4 comments:
This is a very interesting article Maggie! I believe that there is a chance that the prices of the wifi hotspots will go up and people will definitely change their data plans. People will decrease their plans if this were to happen, and networks will get very upset.
I remember reading an article earlier this year about how AT&T is able to manipulate their data. Customers were supposedly paying for unlimited data and roaming but in reality that was not what they were receiving. Apparently AT&T was able to set up a way to make cellular data to lag after a certain amount of data was used. An example would be if a customer reaches 10 GB of data, cellular data would lag, and a customer wouldn't receive the service that they paid for. As we continue to be in the technological revolution we need to keep a close eye on these cell-phone companies to make sure they don't continue to take advantage of the common customer.
I think a push for this has already started happening in Europe especially with the app WhatsApp. A large majority of smartphone users have WhatsApp to communicate with each other and use the app's calling feature just as often. Most establishments also have wifi available to patrons, so this feature can be used almost anywhere without the need to make an actual phone using a service provider.
Having the ability to call via a factory integrated wit-fi feature will certainly shake up the industry. I have actually been researching T-Mobile for my senior seminar class and they were the first to offer the service in an integrated manner, as a part of their "Un-Carrier" campaign to shake up the wireless industry. I suspect a lot of the voice traffic will migrate to VOIP and the pricing will loosen international communications volume.
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