Sprint has begun its soft launch of VoLTE, and starting today, customers in 15 US cities with compatible devices can toggle on the feature. Voice over LTE, which allows for higher quality voice calls through an LTE network, has been available on competitor carriers like Verizon and AT&T for a few years, but the feature is finally arriving on Sprint. Owners of a Samsung Galaxy S8, S8+, or S8 Active in the following markets can access the feature, with more cities and devices to be added in the coming weeks (via S4GRU):
- Atlanta-Athens
- Chicago
- Dallas-Ft. Worth
- Houston
- Indianapolis
- Kansas
- Missouri
- New York City
- Oregon-West Washington
- Philadelphia
- Pittsburgh
- San Francisco Bay
- South Bay
- Southern Jersey
- Washington, DC
Sprint confirmed to The Verge that VoLTE is a replacement to its Calling Plus service “as a much more capable platform that also supports simultaneous voice and data, over more Sprint devices with better voice quality.” Calling Plus was originally launched as an interim VoIP service before Sprint could officially launch VoLTE, and now that commercial deployment is here, the Calling Plus feature is being decommissioned. “Before we do updates market-by-market on various devices, we are alerting Calling Plus customers so they can decide whether to continue using the feature until our VoLTE launch is complete,” a spokesperson commented.
If you own a compatible device and live in a soft launch market, you can toggle on the feature by going to Settings —> Connections —> Voice networks, and turning on VoLTE.