On Monday, May 13, 2019 at 12:24:47 PM UTC-4, Ralph Mowery wrote:
In article ,
says...

Biggest cable phone fiasco I ever saw was with Cablevision in the NYC area.
They have wifi hotspots around the area that their cable customers can use.
I never understood the economics of that, like how they can justify the
cost. But then they decided to start selling wifi only cell phones.
Made zero sense to me. It will only work where you have wifi. Sure,
there might be some people who mostly use a phone where there is service,
but even those, you'd think they would want it to work other places too.
And there were other cheapo prepaid phone companies that offered wifi
calling that would work on any cell phone.
So they marketed that thing for about a year, I guess it failed and
AFAIK, it's gone.



Guess that would be a fiasco.


I have been using Republic for a number of years. They try to use a
wifi system first, but if none is in range it goes to the radio towers.

That's an example of one of the lowcost services I was talking about.
Couldn't remember the name. I looked at a bunch of those last time I
was looking, which was several years ago. The problem with those and
similar like Ting was that they made sense when plans were $70, but
now there is so much competition and choice at $30 or less, a regular
straight cell phone makes more sense.





Not bad for about $ 12.50 a month. They advertised it at $ 10, but add
something over $ 2 in tax. I don't think they offer this any more at
that price. If my phone fails, I will probably switch to another
service.

Mint Mobile is $15 a month if you pay for a year of service. They are
a Tmobile MVNO. For that you get 3GB of high speed data, unlimited V/T.
Also supports wifi hotspot if you need it.





I sort of like it that it goes to wifi first. Usually in a building
they have wifi where the cell towers will not give a signal.

I've only tried wifi calling a little bit, with Ooma. It didn't work
very well. I guess it depends on the company and how robust the wifi
is where you need to use it and probably on how fast your phone hardware
is too. I was also a little dubious about it
being able to go back and forth from wifi to cell, without dropping calls.
Seems hard enough to do that within the cell network by itself. Did
that work OK with Republic?