American telecoms firm Verizon Wireless has followed in the footsteps of its competitor AT&T by announcing plans to introduce Wi-Fi calling in 2015.
The company says the service will become available around the middle of next year, despite previously claiming that it wasn’t interested in diverting customers away from standard mobile connections.
Fran Shammo, Verizon’s CFO, confirmed the decision at the recent Bank of America Merrill Lynch Media, Communications and Entertainment Conference in Los Angeles. He did, however, say there is work to do before the feature can be rolled out, techtimes.com reports.
Interestingly, the move seems to have been made reluctantly, with Mr Shammo saying his company won’t be able to guarantee quality when users move over to wireless connections for calling.
He was quoted by bidnessetc.com as saying: “We built our voice platform so extensively, there was never a need for us to tell our customers, ‘Oh, our network is not good enough so you need to go on Wi-Fi to complete your call.'”
AT&T is also refusing to put all of its eggs in the Wi-Fi calling basket. In a statement last week, CEO Ralph de la Vega said the firm would be introducing the feature but only to complement its existing Voice-over-LTE service.
