T-Mobile Poland has debuted voice over LTE and voice over Wi-Fi in the country, offering the services on Samsung’s Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge handsets.
Software upgrades have been rolling out to customers with the applicable handsets during the past few days. The operator predicted by the end of 2016, around 50,000 customers will have activated the services on their handset.
Work is also underway on enabling the services on other compatible handsets, with further launches expected during the next six weeks. By the end of the first quarter of 2017, T-Mobile Poland has forecast that there will be more than half a million handsets on its network that are VoLTE and voice over Wi-Fi compatible.
In a statement, T-Mobile said the services would improve call quality, particularly indoors in the case of voice over Wi-Fi, and call connection time.
Both services are being offered natively and free of charge. The operator cited the elimination of fallback from LTE to 3G when making a call, which causes a high level of battery consumption, as one of the main reasons for introducing the technology.
The operator added that it has ensured switchover while making a call from an LTE network to a Wi-Fi network is seamless. This switchover is seen as one of the most difficult problems of ensuring both types of technology work effectively.
Russian operator MTS announced this week it would be the first operator in the market to launch Wi-Fi calling, also teaming up with Samsung on the technology.