I suggest you contact Koodo directly and see if some leniency is possible.

Heads up #1: WiFi calling just means that your call  is connected over WiFi (if possible), but normal charges still apply.

Head up #2: check out Easy Roam, to avoid these unexpected “surprises” (I agree with you that roaming fees are insanely high).

Thanks for your answer!

I’d like to contact Koodo directly but I don’t know how since they don’t advertise publicly a customer help phone number. Do you have a way to contact them?

As for the wifi calling, I agree that normal charges would apply but shouldn’t these be just data charges then since the whole call is made over wifi? And since this is made over wifi, then shouldn’t there be no charges? What is the point of wifi calling if it’s not?

And I agree that Easy Roam is available but it’s also really silly to have to manually activate it beforehand. It should be capped to that fee in the first place. Whichever ends-up being cheaper. There is absolutely no reason to charge one rate if you opt-in a service in advance and another if you don’t. Why not just only offer the Easy Roam feature then? You either turn off roaming or you use Easy Roam. Simple, no?

Apologies for the rant here. This situation is “a bit” frustrating. I feel like I have been misinformed and they are making money on my ignorance.

Oh I’m sure they are As for talking to a rep, you can do so using the chat assistant bot. Just say something like “I need a rep” and it will schedule a callback for you.

@jfgoulet I get why you’d think that, but no.  WiFi Calling’s purpose is just to provide you another way to make and receive calls if you have a weaker cellular connection but access to Wi-Fi.  At the end of the day it’s treated like any other call and not like data, even though the call is being transferred over Wi-Fi.  It’s kind of like if you’re not on Wi-Fi and make a a Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) call--the call is using a mobile data connection but counts as calling airtime and not as mobile data usage.

This can be confusing if you’re using to using VoIP providers (some examples: Fongo, TextNow, Skype, Teams, etc.) which can all do calls to/from regular phone numbers, but to your mobile provider are treated as data that comes out of your data bucket rather than your calling minutes; in other words, they look like any other data you might be using to stream music or videos, etc.  

Hopefully that’s a little clearer.  Making/receiving calls using your regular Koodo phone number uses airtime rather than data, regardless of if they are physically being carried over WiFi (WiFi Calling), LTE (VoLTE), or regular/legacy 3G cellular calling connection (WCDMA); making receiving calls using any 3rd party services--regardless of whether they are audio-only or Video calling, and regardless of if they are to a regular phone number or app-to-app--use either mobile data or WiFi and do not use your calling minutes.  Examples of this latter category includes but is not limited to iMessage, FaceTime, WhatsApp, Fongo, Facebook Messenger, TextNow, Skype, Teams, Slack, and so many others.

Wow! That is clearer and really poorly named if that’s what the feature is actually doing. IMO it should be more of an option named “Use Wifi to improve carrier calls” and the actual thing that would be called “Wifi calling” would be another feature where Google’s services (or third party apps) would relay the voice exchange as VoIP. That would remove the confusion and would actually make the feature interesting.

Anyhow, I’ll be reaching out to a rep using Sophia’s trick and see what my options are here.

Thanks for your replies!

Well in fairness, the feature is described in quite a bit of detail here: https://www.koodomobile.com/help/wifi-calling. There's a section below the supported hardware list that talks about billing. Also I believe there's a note that WiFi Calling only works when you're in Canada so it likely was not active. That was something I didn't actually know myself, but it always pays to read up on things before using them, I guess! Buyer beware.  Edit: though I think the feature works the same for all Canadian carriers, so by buyer beware, I just mean understand what you're getting rather than saying Koodo's version is somehow comparatively worse. 

If you frequently roam in the US, and just need to call out, it’s cheaper to get a VoIP account and use their app on your handset when in wifi range.  Turn airplane mode ON, then wifi ON, and you have a wifi-only capable phone.  You can forward your Koodo calls to that number as well.