[Music]
- [Don] Hi, this is Don McAllister
and welcome to another Screen Casts Online weekly tip video.
In this week's tip video,
I'm going to take a look at
two technologies in iOS surrounding WiFi
and that's WiFi Assist and WiFi Calling.
Now, you can control which applications
on your phone or your iPad
can use cellular or mobile data
and that's done by going to Settings and into Mobile Data.
I think it might be labelled something differently in the US,
but here in the UK it's called Mobile Data.
Currently I've got Mobile Data switched on
and these are all the apps that I allow to use mobile data
and that's because my plan, my data plan, is very generous.
It's virtually unlimited so I've got no issues
about using cellular data
so I can have all these switched on.
Now, if you have a restrictive data plan
with not much data allowance,
you might want to either go in
and selectively switch off some of these applications
or switch off Mobile Data completely
and just switch it on and off when it's needed.
But there is a new technology now
which you might be aware of that might affect you
if you have got a restrictive data plan
and that's WiFi Assist.
If we actually scroll right down to the bottom,
down the bottom, keep going,
I didn't realise I had so many applications,
here we go,
we've got WiFi Assist
and basically this allows the iPhone
to switch over to the mobile data or the cellular data
if your WiFi signal isn't very strong
or if there's any connectivity issues with your WiFi signal.
So you might think you're on WiFi
and quite happily using your phone,
you might have actually switched across to cellular
if the WiFi signal isn't strong.
Now, I can see here I've only actually used 11 megabytes.
My WiFi at home is pretty strong so I don't have any issues,
but again if you're on a restrictive data plan,
it might be worth considering whether or not
you want to switch that off.
Now, the other feature is called WiFi Calling,
but whether or not you have WiFi Calling
is dependent on your carrier
as not all carriers support it
and WiFi Calling enables you to make normal phone calls,
but instead of the phone using your cellular connexion,
it uses the local WiFi instead.
Now, unfortunately you can't actually see
on the screen capture.
I think it's because I haven't got my phone
connected to my Mac to capture the screen.
You're just seeing a normal header at the top.
I will include an insert to show you what I normally see.
So this is what I normally see on my phone
and that indicates to me
that if I make any calls at this location,
the call will be routed through my WiFi system
which is of great benefit if you're in a place
that has very weak cellular or mobile signal.
You can actually use WiFi to go through and make the call.
Now, the way you would set up your phone to use WiFi Calling
is to go to Settings and then scroll down to Phone,
here we go Phone,
and then here we have an option for WiFi Calling.
Mine is currently switched on but again,
you might not see this if your carrier doesn't support it.
One other benefit as well
is you can actually use other devices.
If I go to Calls on Other Devices,
you can see these are my other devices,
they can also use WiFi Calling.
Now, for full information on setting up
all your other devices,
go to the support document over at Apple.com
which I'll paste on screen
to get full information on how you switch on
the various devices to use WiFi Calling
in conjunction with your iPhone.