FEATURE VOLTE
ues to be the killer application for mobile operators. “Smart” they may be, but drop the “phone” element from the current crop of devices and you’re dropping 64 per cent of your revenues—according to Ovum research, this is the percentage of MNO turnover that voice will generate by 2015. LTE standards were developed from the get- go on the understanding that circuit-switched voice was not going to be part of the overall picture. This means that mobile operators are faced with the task of bridging the gap between their network evolution strategies and current 2/3G realities. It’s partly their own fault: back in 2002, the 3GPP identified IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) as the specification for packet voice. Since then most of the equipment vendors have developed IMS implementations, and they’ve had them for some time. But expen- sive-to-implement IMS languished on the sidelines while operators focused on LTE
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Mind the gap D
ata might be the driving force behind LTE’s gathering pace, but there’s no escaping the fact that voice contin-
Voice will remain the killer mobile app for the foreseeable future, but how will carriers integrate it with LTE?
projects, dropping the voice ball in favour of tackling the seemingly more immediate threat from a mobile data explosion and the slew of over-the-top (OTT) players that followed in its wake. It was always just assumed that issues such as global scale, interoperability, interconnect and roaming would somehow have been dealt with by the time LTE was ready. Until recently, they weren’t. The GSMA’s VoLTE initiative was launched
in February 2010 and has subsequently been involved in defining the protocols and stand- ards required to make voice over LTE work harmoniously across devices and networks. IMS is a central component of making it work. “The problem we were always going to have with IMS was justifying it as a technology from a business case perspective,” says Dan Warren, senior director of technology at the GSMA. Now that the VoLTE initiative has brought IMS back to centre stage (VoLTE is essentially voice services in the IMS core), perceptions that IMS is too complex or pricey have given way to expediency. “Voice on its own justifies
the expense,” says Warren. “It’s a hundreds of billions of dollars market that needs to evolve to something new. IMS is the best game in town for the carriers to do that with. That alone justifies IMS as a future-facing technology.” Given that we’re some years away from
anything like blanket LTE coverage, roaming and parallel network maintenance will be the name of the game. Many telcos will use LTE for data and legacy networks for voice on a circuit-switched fallback (CSFB)/single radio voice call continuity (SRVCC) basis. CSFB has attracted its share of criticism, with Steve Shaw, vice president for corporate market- ing at infrastructure player Kineto Wireless calling it a “truly horrific solution” that gives early LTE device adopters a “whole reason not to take a call—and that’s your primary revenue lifeblood.” Be that as it may, for most operators right
now, voice is a 2/3G play and will be for the foreseeable future. Ovum analyst Steven Hart- ley notes that the likes of US carrier MetroPCS and Japanese incumbent NTT DoCoMo are »
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