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Hyperturtle writes:

According to Bloomburg, Comcast is rumored to be planning on offering a wireless telephony service, in partnership with Verizon Wireless.

I expect that the wifi calling features will heavily lean on their rollout of Wifi APs installed in customer homes, and when there is a lack of coverage, the Verizon Wireless services will pick up the slack.

Would anyone opt to use this service, knowing that in their home and neighborhoods, they are likely to get a "strong signal" if the data signal for wifi is already strong due to a previous Xfinity rollout? It could be there are areas of poor coverage due to a lack of Xfinity wifi, but overall, if seems that they have a strong placement in the communities they serve.

As a user of voip, and voip over wifi, the complications inherent in providing a consistent audio experience can be a difficult problem to solve, and it often deals with numerous differing devices that may not provide the same level of performance due to hardware or software, let alone network conditions. BYOD can be challenging due to the costs of providing a consistent service for inconsistent hardware.

Comcast has a lot of that problem solved, though, as they control the network and most of the APs. It isn't suggested anywhere, but I would guess that the performance for calls would hinge on the availability of their Xfinity access points, managed by them, and not by people like me with APs in my home providing coverage that their Xfinity device does not. They would need to offer a phone that uses Verizon, so we know that the client hardware will also be well controlled and not subject to differences between vendors.

If the costs are competitive, would you use this service? Does anyone have problems with Verizon Wireless as the backfill for when the wifi capabilities are unavailable?

And lastly, is this of value to any if they provided an application to let you make calls on your tablet/phone/computer, all originating and receiving calls to the same number that is portable and can ring across all of your devices?

All in all, even if video calls are not discussed as part of the offering, this could be an excellent alternative to Skype and similar services. It isn't free, but it will promise a more consistent experience guarantee due to their ability to control qos/data marking of the the end-to-end connectivity on their network.

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