![]() The main thing of course is that it’s free. There are many handy things about wifi calling when you are traveling outside of the US.įree calling. (You know, the INTA gathering where you will attend the MTB XIII reception on May 22 and the Seventh Annual E-Trademarks listserv reception on May 23.) While you are in Barcelona, what will you do with your mobile phone? Will you use the roaming feature of your mobile service in which your American mobile carrier charges you $2.50 per minute for phone calls? Will you purchase a Spanish prepaid SIM card and use a Spanish telephone number during the time you are in Barcelona? The answer relates to the upcoming INTA meeting in Barcelona. How, the patient reader might ask, is this a trademark article? This article is not only a tech article but is also a trademark article. The same would be true when you are visiting at your friend’s home where your mobile phone carrier has only sketchy cellular coverage.īut now let’s turn to one of the things that I said at the beginning of this article. Then wifi calling could give you five bars of signal strength all through your home, using the wifi connections in your home. Suppose that in your own home, your mobile phone carrier has only sketchy cellular coverage. Let’s talk for a moment about how wifi calling might be very helpful to you. And, importantly, nothing about the way that I placed or received the phone calls was different from how it had been if I had been using a cell tower. Importantly, none of this was taking place over a cell tower. My friend called me back, and the call came in as normal. The call went through as normal, to a friend. (See the screen shot at the top of this article.) There was the usual green button for me to push to connect the call, except that it looked a little different because there was a sort of wifi icon next to the image of the telephone handset. I then dialed a telephone number on my phone. There was a little “plus” sign in the icon. At the top of the screen there was the usual icon telling me that I was connected to wifi, except it looked a little different (see at right). To test it, I went to a geographic location nearby to my home where I already knew that AT&T fails to provide usable cell coverage and where I could connect t o a wifi network. AT&T had to “push” an update of my phone’s firmware to my phone, and then the check box became visible. There was supposed to be a place where I could check a box and my phone would work with wifi calling. When I learned about wifi calling a couple of days ago, I went to my phone and clicked around in the settings. ![]() ![]() AT&T started offering wifi calling in about August of 2016, although I did not pay attention to this development until just a couple of days ago. Wifi calling is a service provided by your mobile phone carrier (for example, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, or T-Mobile in the US). You can read a technical explanation of the technology, called GAN (generic access network) and UMA (unlicensed mobile access) here. With wifi calling, your mobile phone sometimes uses a wifi connection to complete a voice telephone call rather than using a conventional cell tower connection. So a reader of this blog may be forgiven for having failed to activate this service before now. The main point of this blog article is that probably you should activate “wifi calling” on your mobile phone, if you have not already done so.įor most mobile telephone customers in the US, wifi calling has only been available for a few months. Today’s blog article is a “tech” article and it is a “trademarks” article.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |