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Comment by binkHN | Hacker News Reader

Nice—never knew about this. How would you compare the coverage and speed to T-Mobile? Does it come with Wi-Fi Calling? Looks like it supports hot spot usage.

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Anecdotally, coverage and speed in my area are slightly better with AT&T than they were with T-Mobile. Based on actual data, AT&T beats out T-Mobile for coverage and speed across most of the US.

Yes it supports wi-fi calling (my Pixel 6a defaults to that whenever I'm at home). And yes it supports tethering / hot spots.

I cannot think of a reason that a mobile network would not include wifi calling. I presume it is all gain for them to take load off their mobile network?

Cricket only allows WiFi calling on certain devices. I had to switch to Mint to get it working

How do they prevent wifi calling?

WiFi calling in this context doesn't mean any random VoIP app, it means using your same phone number as the cellular service uses. That requires the carrier to be involved on the server side even if your handset is not using the cellular modem. (And it probably is using the cellular modem to some extent even during a WiFi call, to support handover between WiFi and cellular.)

I concur, but carriers do weird things. Some of them will want you to purchase a more expensive plan to get that “feature.”

Verizon prevented two of my unlocked phones (Nexus 6P and Moto G6 Power) from using WiFi calling, likely because I didn't buy them through them. The phones were perfectly capable of it but it was just some carrier config that prevented it. I bought an unlocked Samsung A53 and that is suddenly allowed to use WiFi calling, likely because Verizon sells the exact same model. I went years without WiFi calling despite living in two homes that had awful cell signal. Now I have a phone with the feature but have great home cell signal.

I prepay w/ tmobile for 30/mo. No wifi directly but can use google voice for that.

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