Android phone combines wifi calling and cellular networks

Public

At the end of 2012, Nick Fox teamed up with Andy Rubin who 'wanted to rethink how phones use wireless networks, much as Google had already rethought the mobile OS. “The idea was, ‘How can we drive some innovation in connectivity?'” Fox remembers.

Fox loved the idea, in large part because of the role connectivity, as he calls it, plays in modern life. “It has become like water,” he says. “It has become so essential to what we do.” He and Rubin, who has since left Google, discussed the possibility of making calls over W-iFi networks

...The result is Project Fi, a new kind of wireless service Google unveiled in April 2015. With it, phones can not only make calls over Wi-Fi networks, but seamlessly and automatically move those calls onto a cellular networks when the Wi-Fi signal fades. Perhaps more importantly, Project Fi also lets phones move between cellular networks, depending on which one offers the best signal. If the signal from Sprint peters out, your phone can instantly and automatically switch to T-Mobile.

http://www.wired.com/2016/05/google-changing-way-phones-use-wireless/