iPhone 6 Wifi Calling Problems (T-Mobile)

You are not addressing Apple here. Feedback and bug reports to Apple go to their feedback page HERE.

You can use the Contact Us link at the bottom of these pages, otherwise there is no other way. I guess you could also make an appointment at the Genius Bar and explain it to them. Have you contacted T-Mobile and asked them about the issue. I'm guessing here, but I would suppose since this is something new for the iPhone, they should have some knowledge about how it should be working. I have read other posts from people using it and raving about it.

I was not recommending that the Genius Bar could do a fix, but it is a method to communicate more information to Apple, since you could not do it through the bug report. You can always call Apple Care and ask about submitting a file with information and they should be able to help accommodate you.

I agree that not that many people may be taking advantage of Wi-Fi calling, since it is not available for a lot of people in the US yet, and it is a new thing. Good luck with your info.

EDIT: You might also want to post on that thread and urge the poster to make a bug report with Apple. While he may not provide the extensive evidence that you have, he can always make a post, and if necessary, Apple can pull the diagnostics from your phones.

Strange, I had a real hard time replying to this thread, I kept getting logged out, but only on this thread?????

Anyhow, I have documented the same issues as you and even wasted my time going to the apple nerd bar to be told that I should not expect more than 2.5 hours of battery life on my phone with it turned on! What an idiot!!!

Back to your post.

With wi-fi calling on and the phone turned on my service will go to t-mobile wifi and my battery will start dropping rapidly so there is an issue. I have also found that the battery drain is directly related to the Wifi protocol.

I noticed when on my home wireless my drain is minimal in comparison , but at my office it drains extremely fast.

At home I am using a 802.11 "N" router - drain is about 6% per hour - screen on - phone not being used

At work I am using a 802.11 "G" router and my drain is about 45% per hour - screen on - phone not being used.

And as you pointed out with the phone asleep, I don't believe it is communicating with t-mobile's servers so the drain is insignificant.

@ryanfromlaura: Thanks for your hard work on this. I had been doing my own research, but hadn't taken it to the depths you have:

iOS 8: T-Mobile WiFi Calling on 5s issues

I initially suspected that my Cisco ASA-5510 firewall was just being too restrictive, but my further testing seems to mirror yours. I also think there is something else at play, which is the algorithm on how/when the phone determines if/when to use the cellular radio vs. the wifi radio when both are available, especially when in a fringe cell coverage area (such as inside my house).

I wish I knew how to get someone within Apple to pay attention. Genius Bar was nice to me as well, but they don't understand the issue at this depth.

Update: Got a call back from Apple earlier. There are a couple of points which may prove helpful to others.

1 - Apparently one of the issues is might that of the SIM. There are two types of SIMs apparently. 3G and 3GG. The latter being the newest. The newest is the one you want and is shown simply as 60.00 on the SIM card. I confirmed I had the latter, so this was not my issue.

2 - He suggested I update my emergency address in settings-phone-wifi calls. This meant tapping the save button even if the address was already there. You should get a confirmation message saying the address was updated. Before performing this step, my incoming calls were going straight to voicemail. Now they seem to be fine.

Will see how long this stays on. If anyone else can verify this works for them, please post back here. Thanks!

P.S. ryanfromlaura, I pointed the rep to your very detailed post. Suggested their engineers look at it.

Thanks Maudible, I confirmed my Sim card is a "60.00" and I have had the emergency contact entered and saved so I for one can give Apple's suggestion a thumbs down. I was receiving calls via wi-fi so that was not my problem, the fact that the phone would die in less than two hours was. Oh well, it was worth a look, but I did not think that the sim card had anything to do with the wifi radio anyhow. Sounds like they may be throwing darts. I would not be surprised if Apple's next suggestion was to install Angry Birds!!!!

Actually, since following that step of saving the emergency address, I haven't seen any wi-fi issues. Not sure if it's just coincidence, but it worked for me. The Apple rep was really good about touching bases to see if I was still having issues.

Update:

I’ve done some further testing since after having a stable wifi connection, my battery was draining pretty quickly.

I disconnected the the ethernet cable from my iMac and connected to the 5ghz wifi on the TMO cellspot. Ran Speedtest and got the same really low results as with when connecting using iPad or iPhone. Connecting the same iMac to the 2.4ghz had the same success as the iOS devices. So, this wasn’t necessarily an iOS issue for me. I wasn’t expecting that.

I decided to reconnect my Airport Extreme and test both frequencies on that router. Speedtest ran fine every time on both frequencies on iMac, iPhone and iPad.

I then switched back to the TMO Cellspot router and tested all three there. Again, problems on the 5ghz network on the TMO cellspot. I unplugged power to both modem and cellspot, then reconnected. Since then, I’ve had no battery drain issues, and no wifi calling issues.

For example, I unplugged my phone at about 8 this morning. I’ve downloaded two apps and demo’d one showing a brief movie clip (from an Air Video server on a Mini). I’ve made one brief phone call and am still at 99% at 11:20am. I was at 100% at 11:13am. All this while wi-fi calling is turned on using the 5ghz frequency.

On iPhone 6.

I'm seeing this exact issue with 8.1.2. in fact, it seems that it is worse than it was with 8.0.

Symptoms on the phone are:

Walk into house, phone associates with WiFi

few seconds later, carrier name changes to T-Mobile WiFi

a minute or so later, it switches back to T-Mobile

20 seconds later, switches back to T-Mobile WiFi

Lather, Rinse, Repeat ad infinitum.

Unfortunately, I'm using the CellSpot router so I can't get in and trace the packets as the poster does here, but it would appear the two are identical scenarios.

I also spend a lot of time at a friend's house without the CellSpot and same behavior.

In addition, I routinely get calls dropped during this switchover, and apps using data get all screwed up.

Unfortunately the only solution (I reset network settings, rebooted, changed to the CellSpot, etc) is to disable WiFi Calling entirely. Once I do that, battery drain is more like 7-8% per day when at the house (and on WiFi).

Resetting Network settings worked for me (Settings / General / Reset / Reset Network Settings). Prior to that one of two things would happen;

1. I could hear the person on the other end, but they could not hear me;
2. I could not get a call to go through via wifi calling (it would appear to start the call via wifi calling, but the icon would go away and revert back to the cell network)

I should note, that even though I'm able to now (at least) make and receive calls, and both ends of the line can hear the other, I do still see the wifi calling icon pop on and off when I'm well within range of my wifi router. This is a problem because during the day (when I need my phone most) I'm in an area with poor (and that's being generous) cell coverage with T-mobile. If the wifi calling feature is going in and out sporadically, this means my I'm likely risking losing important calls to VM. This needs to be fixed.

I recently switched from dd-wrt on an Asus RT-N10+ to the stock T-Mobile WiFi router. In the process, I am killing the battery life on my iPhone 6 when using WiFi. The phone itself gets warm and it feels like I can watch the battery life count down -- approximately 1% every minute to two minutes. I thought maybe the wider RF channel bandwidth offered by the T-Mobile WiFi router was the issue, so I backed these down to 20 MHz. I still have the issue. At work on WiFi there is no problem. On the stock T-Mobile WiFi router at home I'm having problems. Sigh ...

Regards,

g00ber0

I have experienced similar problems first with the signal booster, then wifi calling through my wifi network and finally with the cellspot. The phone cannot decide which network to use. Might be that when I start the call it is showing T-mobile WiFi, but it goes back to the T-mobile network before the call connects (which is 0 to 1 bars at my place). Called T-mobile and finally they realized that eventhough they had sent me the cellspot router, they had not activated the wifi calling feature at their end! Now it is active and let's see if I get any improvement.