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Voice-over-LTE: The Reason Why Your Phone May Soon Stop Working

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Re: Voice-over-LTE: The Reason Why Your Phone May Soon Stop Working

#11

Post by kiwijamo »

gst wrote: post #9
lxgr wrote: post #3

One often unexpected consequence for tourists visiting a country that has executed a complete 2G and 3G shutdown is that they won't be able to make voice calls, even if their phone and plan supports IMS (i.e. VoLTE) when at home.

For some reason lots of Android phones (even the Pixel models from Google) seem to use a whitelist approach that is quite restrictive regarding where VoLTE is supported. For example at least up until recently (and probably still the case?) Pixel phones only supported VoLTE in countries that were in the list of countries in which the Google store official sold Pixel phones. Meanwhile newer iOS versions seem to nowaday…

And worse, it differs when roaming. I am aware there are networks where if you are their customer VoLTE works but if you are roaming onto their network it does not work at all. With the exact same device.

Re: Voice-over-LTE: The Reason Why Your Phone May Soon Stop Working

#12

Post by Izkata »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #10
beretguy wrote: post #8

My main concern with these higher frequency connections is that they require a lot more power to run. So we can’t have phones that will last weeks without charging.

Turn off cellular and wifi on your phone. I bet it won’t last more than a few days anyway. I don’t think radio power consumption is the barrier keeping us from weeks-long battery life.

I actually did this with my old Android phone earlier this summer after getting my new one. Under normal use I had to charge it every day, with Airplane Mode on (and, granted, not using it) the battery lasted like 3 or 4 weeks.

Re: Voice-over-LTE: The Reason Why Your Phone May Soon Stop Working

#13

Post by timschmidt »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #10
beretguy wrote: post #8

My main concern with these higher frequency connections is that they require a lot more power to run. So we can’t have phones that will last weeks without charging.

Turn off cellular and wifi on your phone. I bet it won’t last more than a few days anyway. I don’t think radio power consumption is the barrier keeping us from weeks-long battery life.

Installing a version of Android without Google Play Services running constantly in the background effectively doubles handset battery life in my experience. Disabling radios can do that again if the device is rarely used.

Re: Voice-over-LTE: The Reason Why Your Phone May Soon Stop Working

#14

Post by gst »

timschmidt wrote: post #13
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turn off cellular and wifi on your phone. I bet it won’t last more than a few days anyway. I don’t think radio power consumption is the barrier keeping us from weeks-long battery life.

Installing a version of Android without Google Play Services running constantly in the background effectively doubles handset battery life in my experience. Disabling radios can do that again if the device is rarely used.

Slightly offtopic but related: One of my mobile providers supports configuring public (non firewalled) IP addresses for mobile devices and when choosing that option my phone battery drains very significantly faster than otherwise. I suspect it's because all the random packets that arrive every second or so on the public interface (when NAT and firewall are disabled) either cause the radio to use a lot more battery or prevent the CPU from going into sleep mode (or both of that).

Re: Voice-over-LTE: The Reason Why Your Phone May Soon Stop Working

#15

Post by supertrope »

gst wrote: post #9
lxgr wrote: post #3

One often unexpected consequence for tourists visiting a country that has executed a complete 2G and 3G shutdown is that they won't be able to make voice calls, even if their phone and plan supports IMS (i.e. VoLTE) when at home.

For some reason lots of Android phones (even the Pixel models from Google) seem to use a whitelist approach that is quite restrictive regarding where VoLTE is supported. For example at least up until recently (and probably still the case?) Pixel phones only supported VoLTE in countries that were in the list of countries in which the Google store official sold Pixel phones. Meanwhile newer iOS versions seem to nowaday…

There are a lot of interoperability bugs in VoLTE. The best part of standards is that each vendor implements it slightly differently.

Apple tends to hold back a feature until all carriers have blessed it. Apple withholds Carrier Bundles from MVNOs who don’t promote iPhones, so iPhones are more likely to be used on fully compatible carriers. They also have significant market weight so a MNO is less likely to decide they can’t bother to fix interoperability bugs with iPhones.

There’s a correlation between buyers of expensive smartphones and higher ARPU customers which further increases incentive to put in the engineering resources to squash bugs but only for flagship phones. MNOs also have an incentive against improving interoperability as it makes it easier to switch to another carrier (“churn”).

Re: Voice-over-LTE: The Reason Why Your Phone May Soon Stop Working

#16

Post by dmos62 »

MrRadar wrote: post #6
usr1106 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the 2G network is still running at least for T-Mobile. I happened to check earlier today.

New T-Mobile SIMs haven't been able to work in 2G phones for a bit now. If you have an older SIM that's still active you can use it in a 2G phone but they don't want new customers using non-VoLTE devices on their network. They also haven't invested in expandning their 2G footprint since about 2015 when their network was significantly smaller. The 2G service will be discounted in April.

I happen to have a newly bought T-Mobile prepaid SIM card. It offers limited "high speed data" (4G, 5G, etc) and unlimited "slow speed data" (2G, 3G). Once I ran out of "high speed data", my service was supposed to fallback to 2G, but it doesn't work. I asked why via customer support and the consultant said that they know that it doesn't work, even though they're selling it. Took me 60 minutes on the phone to get to that point. I just gave up. I ended up paying 30 dollars for around 3gb of data and wasting a bunch of time. T-Mobile has been horrible in my limited experience.

Re: Voice-over-LTE: The Reason Why Your Phone May Soon Stop Working

#17

Post by crazygringo »

Izkata wrote: post #12
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turn off cellular and wifi on your phone. I bet it won’t last more than a few days anyway. I don’t think radio power consumption is the barrier keeping us from weeks-long battery life.

I actually did this with my old Android phone earlier this summer after getting my new one. Under normal use I had to charge it every day, with Airplane Mode on (and, granted, not using it) the battery lasted like 3 or 4 weeks.

> and, granted, not using it

Well sure, then it's like a tablet in standby, which similarly can last a month or so.

But it's not going to last more than a day or two if you've got the screen on, playing games, watching movies, using apps offline.

Re: Voice-over-LTE: The Reason Why Your Phone May Soon Stop Working

#18

Post by fwmcbumcrumble »

dmos62 wrote: post #16
MrRadar wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New T-Mobile SIMs haven't been able to work in 2G phones for a bit now. If you have an older SIM that's still active you can use it in a 2G phone but they don't want new customers using non-VoLTE devices on their network. They also haven't invested in expandning their 2G footprint since about 2015 when their network was significantly smaller. The 2G service will be discounted in April.

I happen to have a newly bought T-Mobile prepaid SIM card. It offers limited "high speed data" (4G, 5G, etc) and unlimited "slow speed data" (2G, 3G). Once I ran out of "high speed data", my service was supposed to fallback to 2G, but it doesn't work. I asked why via customer support and the consultant said that they know that it doesn't work, even though they're selling it. Took me 60 minutes on the phone to get to…

You don't fall back to the actual 2g connection. You're supposed to fall back to 2g speeds aka 128kbps or 256kbps. You'll still be connected to LTE towers, just at painfully slow speeds.

Re: Voice-over-LTE: The Reason Why Your Phone May Soon Stop Working

#19

Post by fwmcbumcrumble »

MrRadar wrote: post #6
usr1106 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the 2G network is still running at least for T-Mobile. I happened to check earlier today.

New T-Mobile SIMs haven't been able to work in 2G phones for a bit now. If you have an older SIM that's still active you can use it in a 2G phone but they don't want new customers using non-VoLTE devices on their network. They also haven't invested in expandning their 2G footprint since about 2015 when their network was significantly smaller. The 2G service will be discounted in April.

They're much better than verizon who will just terminate your line with maybe a little bit of heads up.

We found out the hard way when they terminated our line after having a sim card in a non volte phone for about a week, and didn't get the text alert until AFTER the line was disconnected.

Re: Voice-over-LTE: The Reason Why Your Phone May Soon Stop Working

#20

Post by gnicholas »

One change I noticed from LTE to VoLTE is that the line now goes silent when the coverage gets spotty. Before, you would hear bits and pieces. The benefit to that was that even if you were talking you could hear little bits coming through (including silence) and you would know that the other person probably couldn't hear you well. Now you just hear nothing, and have no idea.
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