This has been a year when initial high hopes for Voice over LTE deployments were largely dashed, but 2014 should be different, with many major 4G carriers planning to bite the bullet and roll out the IP-based successor to circuit switched voice.
Verizon and AT&T are both promising VoLTE in the early part of next year, joining US frontrunner MetroPCS (now part of T-Mobile). The only country with wall-to-wall VoLTE is South Korea, where all three cellcos support the offering, but others will follow suit in 2014, and China Mobile is even testing the TDD version of the technology.
A few players will even sneak in before year end, including PCCW-HKT in Hong Kong and Tele2 in Sweden. The former has completed a VoLTE trial with Huawei and will become the first to offer the service in Hong Kong.
HKT said it laid the foundations early this year with the introduction of IMS (IP Multimedia Subsytem, which underpins VoLTE) on top of its 4G network. This will enable it to migrate users from existing voice and SMS services to the all-IP environment, as well as offering rich communications functionality such as HD voice and multimedia calling.
Of course, device availability is always the main decider of how far the market develops, especially outside countries like Korea where the cellcos have close-knit relationshiops with their handset suppliers. HKT’s head of engineering for wireless, Adam Wong, commented: ‘We are looking forward to the availability of VoLTE devices so that customers can enjoy the unparalleled user experience of voice and data on LTE network.’
Meanwhile, Tele2 is readying VoLTE services in Sweden, also working with Huawei. Speaking at a mobile broadband forum organized by the Chinese vendor in London, Tele2’s CTO Joachim Hom said the service had now been tested and launch would follow at the turn of the year. ‘The service has amazing quality,’ he said. The operator will also support VoLTE and IMS, supplied by Mavenir, ‘from day one’ on its LTE-only network in The Netherlands, due to go live next year. However, Hom said it would likely be 2015 before there was a wide choice of smartphones with native VoLTE support.
Ericsson recently announced a contract to supply Softbank of Japan with a mobile core upgrade to support IMS and VoLTE,including the Multimedia Telephony Application Server (MTAS). Ericsson is an existing core and RAN vendor to Softbank.
The Swedish vendor’s CTO Ulf Ewaldsson believes the vast majority of operators will eventually offer VoLTE services, but told Mobile World that the technology has not been deployed as quickly as expected ‘ largely because CSFB (circuit switch fallback) is ‘good enough’ to offer a consistent user experience at present, and because most cellcos do not have wide 4G coverage yet. ‘You can’t launch a very good VoLTE service if you have spotty LTE coverage,’ he said. ‘ When we work with operators on VoLTE we ask them: Is your coverage good enough to do it? That’s our key question to them.’