WiFi calling not working

Stahlmann · January 4, 2024

So i got this situation where i live in a basement apartment and the walls and ceiling are concrete, so i got no cell reception when i'm home. My current workaround is to use the call feature from WhatsApp, which works for most of my family and friends but my grandparents for example don't have a smartphone so internet calling doesn't work in this case. It's obviously a big problem in case of an emergency, for example i can't even reach the police or fire department from home.

My phone supports WiFi calling, meaning i should be able to call normal phone numbers through my home internet connection. Sadly my specific cell provider didn't offer this feature so i switched to a different provider which does. Now it still doesn't work. The strange thing is, my parents have the same cell provider and can both use WiFi calling without problems when they're at my place. If i put one of their SIM cards into my phone it also works, so my phone isn't the problem and my router also isn't somehow blocking WiFi calls.

What exactly does happen when i try to make a WiFi call:

I tap on call and i don't even have the dial up sound, not even a timer on how long the call was. After a minute of silence from my phone the call just ends. The person i tried to call doesn't get any notification that i tried to call them.

Now the real problem is that it seems like not a single level 1 support employee of one of the largest German cell providers (O2) has ever heard of WiFi calling, a feature that they claim to support. And all my tries at getting through to an employee who knows what i'm talking about have failed. Either they didn't offer any solution because they didn't understand my issue, their solutions didn't work or they said they're gonna get back to me after talking to higher level support and i never heard of them again. I also have no way of directly reaching the same person again because i only have the phone number of the hotline. So if i call them back i'm back to square one.

Does anyone have any tips about making it work, or maybe how to get to a support employee who may actually be of help? Switching providers isn't that easy because the contract lasts for one year. Maybe i could get out of it for false advertising of this particular feature i need, but it's a road i only want to get down as a last resort.

Thanks in advance!

DoctorNick · January 4, 2024

54 minutes ago, Stahlmann said:

So i got this situation where i live in a basement apartment and the walls and ceiling are concrete, so i got no cell reception when i'm home. My current workaround is to use the call feature from WhatsApp, which works for most of my family and friends but my grandparents for example don't have a smartphone so internet calling doesn't work in this case. It's obviously a big problem in case of an emergency, for example i can't even reach the police or fire department from home.

My phone supports WiFi calling, meaning i should be able to call normal phone numbers through my home internet connection. Sadly my specific cell provider didn't offer this feature so i switched to a different provider which does. Now it still doesn't work. The strange thing is, my parents have the same cell provider and can both use WiFi calling without problems when they're at my place. If i put one of their SIM cards into my phone it also works, so my phone isn't the problem and my router also isn't somehow blocking WiFi calls.

What exactly does happen when i try to make a WiFi call:

I tap on call and i don't even have the dial up sound, not even a timer on how long the call was. After a minute of silence from my phone the call just ends. The person i tried to call doesn't get any notification that i tried to call them.

Now the real problem is that it seems like not a single level 1 support employee of one of the largest German cell providers (O2) has ever heard of WiFi calling, a feature that they claim to support. And all my tries at getting through to an employee who knows what i'm talking about have failed. Either they didn't offer any solution because they didn't understand my issue, their solutions didn't work or they said they're gonna get back to me after talking to higher level support and i never heard of them again. I also have no way of directly reaching the same person again because i only have the phone number of the hotline. So if i call them back i'm back to square one.

Does anyone have any tips about making it work, or maybe how to get to a support employee who may actually be of help? Switching providers isn't that easy because the contract lasts for one year. Maybe i could get out of it for false advertising of this particular feature i need, but it's a road i only want to get down as a last resort.

Thanks in advance!

Call them up again and ask to talk with some of the tech guys, WIFI calling is pretty standard nowadays. Also you've already done the testing for them. They only need to enable it on the sim card. Should be possible. If not then make a bad review of the company on some review site like trustpilot or maybe facebook. Also while checking out their site I found this. They call it WLAN-Telefonie: https://www.o2online.de/service/wlan-telefonie/

So maybe use that term when calling them up again.. It's amazing how bad customer service is nowadays