Interesting. I guess I was under the impression some other MVNOs use similar software (Google Fi comes to mind).
Not quite, and this was one of the problems I had with Republic as their sales and marketing muddied the waters in an attempt to look like they were somehow doing something industry leading and pioneering instead using kludgy workarounds to make VoIP work on slow, high-latency mobile networks. What Fi (and everyone with VoLTE networks now) uses is built on a decade plus old GSM standard for call hand-off through the mobile network that T-Mobile's made available in this country long before any other network carrier, especially to their MVNOs (P'tel was the first, with Ting, US Mobile, and Ultra/Mint all providing it with native compatible handsets as well, no proprietary apps to make it happen as it was baked into the OS - the old Nokia S40 and BBOS platforms were the first, and Windows Mobile also reliably supported it long before iPhone and Android did). VoLTE is actually just an extension of the original GAN extensions, which is how the old WiFi calling feature works. The biggest hurdles on widespread adoption were modems that supported the feature, and beefy enough hardware to provide low enough latency audio processing on these monolithic kernel smartphone operating systems (read iOS and Android's code bloat slowed adoption down).
Though Republic is now a TMo MVNO (and I'd hoped they'd finally just operate as an MVNO), they're still apparently relying on proprietary apps to trunk and hand-off calls independent of T-Mobile's call routing as a way to save money. Republic is basically a VoIP provider trying to make itself look like a mobile carrier by using a mobile network to fall back on when necessary. You can reproduce the experience using any VoIP provider that supports SMS texting and uses Counterpath's server technology coupled with the Bria SIP app on whatever internet connected smartphone you have... or just using Google Voice.
So I did some sniffing to try to find IP's latest iteration of the guide and came up short; could you point me in the right direction?
I hung the towel up on the guide nearly a year ago. My last serious post on the subject can be found
here.