LTE or Nothing

[rhapdog]

Sorry I'm late to the party. Missed this thread earlier.

@RumoredNow, you are a great help on these forums. Glad you're around. I'm going to put some of these tricks in my notebook for future reference.

For information, my AT&T GoPhone Lumia 635 has "phone" as the APN, and it behaves by switching between the LTE, H, H+, 4G as it should, just as badcat's update indicates.

I believe, if I'm not mistaken, if you get kicked off LTE on an HD Voice call, then you will drop your call. This is why AT&T uses nxtgenphone as the APN on phones that are HD Voice capable, to prevent it from grabbing a slower signal that would cause you to drop your HD Voice call. If you don't use HD Voice, then it is perfectly safe to change this. If you DO use HD Voice a good bit, then making this change could conceivably cause some dropped calls when you travel to areas that have this issue. Just a heads up there. At least, that's MY understanding.

The thing is with HD Voice is that unless both parties have it enabled and are both in an area where they can use it, it won't get used. If you call someone that is not using HD Voice (or VoLTE depending on the term used by your provider), then HD Voice is meaningless, as it will go back to 2G voice automatically.

I don't know anyone that I can call that has an HD Voice capable phone, except one. I don't call that person very often, and generally try to make it as short of a call as possible when I do. The people I spend time talking with, well, let's just say it wouldn't do me any good if I had a phone with HD Voice. More power to those that can use it.

 

[anon(123856)]

Thank you for adding to this thread. I agree RumoredNow is a great source of help and information.

I don't think I have ever used HDVoice because I've always seen my connection drop to 4G while in a call and then pop right back to LTE when I hang up. I guess I can understand the reasoning behind the choice AT&T made but in practice it meant that I lost all connectivity in places where I shouldn't have, which was aggravating.

Using the "phone" APN seems to have restored the functionality I expected and I haven't seen any downside as of yet either. Wherever I normally saw LTE I still do and it only falls back when LTE is not available.

Thanks for the additional info on HD Voice calling. I guess I also don't really care about it very much either. I also don't spend a lot of time talking and when I do the call quality is good enough as is.

Thanks again!