It’s been a while since we’ve heard any news regarding prepaid operator Republic Wireless, but today they broke the silence by announcing a new feature of the service.
Bonded Calling is an addition to Republic Wireless that aims to improve your voice call experience. With Bonded Calling, a Republic device will recognize when there are weak conditions on Wi-Fi and patch those weak areas with a cellular signal, improving the voice call for the subscriber. In its testing, Republic found that Bonded Calling offered a 52 percent increase in overall Wi-Fi call quality and a 209 percent increase in call quality at the edge of a Wi-Fi network.
Bonded Calling is now rolling out to customers, and Republic Wireless says that its subscribers don’t have to do anything to get it.
“Until recently, we engineered for optimal voice quality on Wi-Fi in an ‘either – or’ scenario – either calls traveled over the Wi-Fi network assuming sufficient quality conditions or calls were automatically and seamlessly handed over to the cellular network,” said David Morkin, co-founder and CEO of Bandwidth and Republic Wireless. “And any calls made on cellular network stayed on the cellular network. Last year we were the first provider to announce seamless cell to Wi-Fi handover – that is the ability to hand calls made on the traditional, circuit-switched cellular network back to Wi-Fi,” Morken said.
This sounds like a nice improvement to calling on Republic Wireless that will help to ensure that you experience fewer dropped calls and better voice quality, even if your Wi-Fi connection is less than quality. Republic has also teased that it’s got more announcements to make in the coming months, so if you’re a subscriber, be sure to stay tuned.