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Before wireless operators started
their transition to LTE, consumers
were increasingly turning to
over-the-top (OTT) solutions,
such as Apple’s Facetime and
Microsoft’s Skype, for voice
and video services. While
those services initially didn’t
always deliver the best calling
experiences, the creators of the
OTT solutions made great strides
in the intervening years to improve
the quality of service. Now, as
wireless operators move to deploy
their own version of IP-based voice
services, the sound and delivery
quality must be top of mind to
compete with OTT and legacy
voice systems.
But these new voice technologies
are coming at a time when
consumers are using their mobile
services in ways they didn’t in
previous generations. Gone are the
days when you picked up a phone
to make a phone call and set it
down until the next call. Nowadays,
consumers are constantly checking
their smartphones for email,
Facebook updates and Twitter
feeds. The Internet of Things (IoT),
which involves everything from
LTE modules in cars to heart and
glucose monitors, brings with it
a whole new set of services that
are constantly tapping the mobile
networks. Because voice and data
services travel over the same LTE
pipes – pipes that were separate
entities in earlier technologies like
circuit switch – decisions must
constantly be made by the network
so that an emergency 911 call, for
example, is given priority over a
run-of-the-mill email.
While operators in South Korea
have boasted VoLTE services for
some time now, major operators
in the United States have been
slower to deploy VoLTE. Rigorous
testing has been required to make
sure services work as advertised,
but once proven, U.S. operators
can use VoLTE as a jumping o
point for new services aimed at
delivering high-quality voice
and video conferencing services,
among others, that rival anything
that has come before (3G) or
after (OTT).
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The big move
to VoLTE
For decades, wireless operators relied on circuit-switched voice
domain to deliver voice services, and that worked fine. But when
operators decided to migrate to the data-centric Long Term
Evolution (LTE) technology, which can deliver greater capacity
and lower latency at a time when mobile data consumption is at
an all-time high, they needed a new way to deliver voice services.
The big move to VoLTE |