Since the release of wifi calling, many people have found new advantages to using the internet for phone calls. However, there are also some disadvantages to using wifi calling instead of a traditional phone service. Below are six disadvantages of wifi calling.

Introduction: What is Wifi Calling?

When you are outside it is sometimes hard to find a reception for your phone. This is made even harder if you are only connected to WiFi calling. You need to find and connect to a Wifi Signal. WiFi calling has its advantages and there are several disadvantages of WiFi calling too. We will review the pros and cons throughout this brief article to help you to understand the different calling options available and to try to show which one we think might be best for your circumstances and the types of calls that you make.

WiFi Calling is simply making telephone calls using an Internet connection. It is a VoIP solution. This can be done on your laptop, tablet, computer or through your phone. You need an internet connection to complete any Wifi Call and that internet connection needs to be stable enough to maintain a conversation.

Using the Wifi Connection for calls is often a less stable connection than a LAN Cable or a phone line, which leads to many of the disadvantages of WiFi calling that we will discuss later.

History of calling

How have we moved to this point in time where we use phones more than any other form of communication? Historically, people have needed to communicate. It started in the prehistoric era, when people needed to communicate regarding what to eat, where to find water, and which animals and foods to avoid. Fight or flight governed communication. People in one village would rarely see or speak to people in the next village over, and therefore dialects and local languages developed. In some less developed countries, there can be hundreds of dialects and languages used, and people in neighbouring towns might speak slightly differently to each other.

There developed a need for communication between villages and even countries. People would go exploring, they would set sail on boats and cross rivers, lakes, and seas to other places to see what other natural resources are available and to grow their territory. This required longer distance communication and smoke signals, or pictorial communication grew.

As humanity developed, as did the need for longer distance communication. During times of war, letters or messages needed to be communicated to the front line. During pilgrimages people needed to be kept aware of things back home. When someone was banished from the village for impregnating the Chieftains daughter, people in the village needed to stay in communication with them. So, distances grew, and with the longer distances, better communication devices were needed.

First came the letter, then the telegram, then Radio, telephone and now the mobile phone and Wifi Calling is further evolution of the necessary communication between people. There is even a similarity today between the emojis that we use in textual communication and the pictorial communication of the caveman!

As communication evolves, as does the technology that we use to communicate. This is evident in the mobile phone more than any other communication device. From calling to text, from text to video calling, from areas of limited coverage to maximum coverage of 5G Data coverage. As communication develops, the need for more channels of communication grows with it, and WiFi calling on the mobile phone is a large part of that evolution today.

Why is it important to call

People need to stay in touch with their friends, family, employers, hobbies, interests for social engagement and need to continue to communicate to find food and shelter. Basic human needs motivate and underpin the need for communication.

With more people living a far distance from the place that they grew up, the need for international calling is strong. People find work, relationships and build a new life for themselves in distant countries that our ancestors had not discovered yet, emphasizing the need for communication more today than ever before.

Even when you go on holiday, you need to communicate with people back home, to make sure that they are safe. These long-distance calls are a part of life, and WiFi calling is a means to achieve these ends.

Why do businesses use Wifi Calling?

In business and commerce, the telephone is one of the ways in which businesses communicate and operate. There are people who, with nothing more than a phone, can make money and grow a business. There are businesses that are completely reliant on the use of the phone, so they need to find ways to reduce the costs of both the users of the phones and the calls made through the phones.

Moving a business overseas results in a cheaper workforce but used to involve an increase in operational costs related to phone charges and call costs. These costs were crippling for a business, especially during the early stages of development. Long distance calling used to carry high charges, and have such bad latency issues, that the call would break up, or the receiving party and the speaker would overlap their speech, because of the time it took for the data packets to reach the other person. There was a huge lag, or time delay, on the calls, making it difficult to communicate properly.

WiFi calling changed that overnight. Business calling went online, reduced the costs of a phone line down to an internet subscription sufficient to support hundreds of people, all making hundreds of calls a day.

The cost of the call reduced, and call centres were created in places like India, South Africa and the Philippines.  As long as there is internet, businesses around the world could build teams of low paid staff, reducing costs onshore and outsourcing work that could be done on the phone lines.

Businesses today use Wifi calling to support millions of jobs worldwide, as well as to increase their operational hours, reduce overheads and improve their operations.

What functions does calling support

The simple phone system can run a business. Sales, marketing, business development and many managerial and operational tasks are completed over the phone lines. With more people needed to go to meetings and to work remotely, they can do their job with the use of a good phone system.

Businesses with international trade can maintain operations through Wifi calling globally. Someone in India can have a UK number and sound as close as if they were in the London office, calling someone in Brighton!

Emergency services can save millions of lives through good communication and connection. This is commonly done through mobile phone connections.

Families and friends can stay in touch with each other through the continual connection provided by telephones.

The functions that a simple phone call can provide to a family, a business of to a person’s life are almost limitless.

Benefits of Wifi calling

Before looking at the disadvantages of WiFi calling, it would be remiss of us to not consider the benefits first. WiFi calling carries many benefits including the ability to use it for work, pleasure, or survival.  Through the internet people can communicate from anywhere with a strong connection, to anyone else with a strong connection.

Call charges are generally cheaper than using the generic phone lines of old. Since the user only needs an internet connection to make and receive Wifi calls, it reduces the need for long term contracts, phone charges, connection to carriers and handsets.

Wifi calling supports long distance calls across borders. People from anywhere in the world with an internet connection can sound like they are in your home country, connect to your phone system and be a valuable part of the business.

Expats survive in their new country through the medium of communication, supported by continual internet connection.

Numbers can be ported from landlines and carriers when people or businesses move abroad. It is possible to keep the same phone number for a business or for your landline home phone number and move abroad with it. People can call you on the UK number that you have had for many years whilst you are living abroad, meaning that you can stay in touch with loved ones easily.

As your business, or as your family expands, new numbers can easily be added to your phone plans making communication easier and seamless. The new phone numbers are a cheap addition to your internet package, meaning that you can have a number for business, for personal, for family and for friends all online, through your internet phone system.

Reduced prices of VoIP calls mean that making a phone call you are not concerned with monthly bills and tariffs. You are not limited to only using 100 minutes a month and can talk as much as you need to with your friends and family.

Disadvantages of Wifi Calling:

Whilst the benefits for WiFi calling are generally around the economics of long-distance calling, the disadvantages are generally around the functionality and quality of those calls.  When you pay less for a service, you get short term benefits of reduced costs, but the long-term impact of poor quality can impact the business in ways that can affect your customers, and your business for the future.

If you buy a secondhand car, it might get you from A to B but it is going to break down, you are paying less, for a worse quality product to serve a temporary purpose.  If you invest in WiFi calling, you are investing time and money in a service that you know is going to provide worse quality calls and service in the long term.

Using WiFi Calling requires consistent internet. This is hard to achieve in some countries and in some locations. Both parties at both ends of the conversation need to have high-speed, consistent internet connection throughout the call, otherwise the call will drop, you will miss words and the call could sound robotic. 

As data packets are sent from one end to the other, any disruption in the process can lead to delays, or broken reception on the call. When one interruption occurs, it has knock on, domino effects for the rest of the call, meaning that the whole call can simply stop, the recording has huge gaps in it, or people at both ends can not understand what is happening.

Another disadvantage to WiFi calling is the requirement of headsets or handsets capable of receiving and making these calls. Headsets can be expensive, handsets even more so. Using mobile phones for WiFi calling requires a handset capable of making and receiving these calls, and not all models and makes have the functionality.

A further disadvantage of WiFi calling is the need for being in constant connection to the router for the calls to pass through. It is common for Routers to have a range or only cover a certain distance. As you move further away from the main source of the call, the connection gets worse, and the data packets can not be received to facilitate the call.

Mobile data reception can accommodate this disadvantage and improve the service, but then you are even more reliant upon a strong connection, which mobile data does not allow, especially in remote locations, or locations with a lot of obstacles in the way of the transmissions.

The reliability of WiFi Calling is the biggest disadvantage to the process, and the reliability needs to be covered by both the originator of the call and the receiver of the call.

WiFi Calling can not be accurately completed whilst you are out and about, due to the patches of high connection, combined with blackspots, or areas where there is simply no connection. So, if you are looking for a mobile solution to your phone connection, this limits travel.

During the pandemic, people did not know where they would be working from, they require access to internet in order to do their work, and WiFi calling requires access to different internet providers. It is common for ISP’s to have downtime, this greatly affects the effectiveness of WiFi calling and adds another disadvantage to the growing list.

Moving offices, spending time on the road between meetings, moving to a new country, or any changes that happen during everyday operations of your growing business means that you also require a service that is simple to set up, easy to manage and adaptable to the changes imposed on business owners, is the intermittent reception of WiFi calling a disadvantage that you can live with due to the costs, or is it a blockage to your business?

Summary of Options

There are several options to consider when looking for a new phone solution, and in today’s busy working environment it is hard to have something as consistent as a desk phone, or a landline cable. These might be good for back up options, but with people working from the road, events, home or remotely, from a beach, alternative options must always be considered. 

Mobile communications are best and the benefits of Mobile communication far outweigh the disadvantages, so the choice comes to using your mobile for mobile calling, or adding a Wifi calling solution to your phone.

I hope that the list of Disadvantages of WiFi calling above have identified where your business could fail if you put all your communication eggs in one WiFi basket.

Choosing the Mobile connectivity from ConxHub and avoiding the unreliable WiFi calling options could save your business thousands of pounds in the long term. Staying connected keeps the wheels of commerce turning!