Taking that pebble out of your shoe, and the move to LTE voice

Mobile providers in Canada and around the world are walking around with a proverbial “pebble” in their shoe and could save millions of dollars each month when advancements in LTE wireless technology inevitably allow them to take it out, technology experts and industry insiders say. Once touted as the future of mobile communications, voice over LTE—or VoLTE—has been largely “ignored” by network operators for much of the past four years as they focused on catering to consumers’ increasing demand for better and faster data services. As a result, LTE-equipped phones now focus their speed on data transmissions. They're designed to drop their LTE signals and “fall back” on older network technologies whenever users make or receive a call, requiring mobile network operators to run parallel networks across their LTE footprint. All of that is about to change. “What we are beginning to see now is equipment manufacturers and handset manufacturers are increasing their support for the full range of voice over LTE requirements,” said Dan Warren, senior director of technology at international industry group the GSM Association, who led the association’s voice-over-LTE initiative when it launched in 2011. “We are expecting to see a lot more voice over LTE deployment in the next 12 to 18 months.” Unlike older mobile technologies, Warren said, LTE networks are unable to carry phone calls over traditional telecom infrastructure, and require mobile providers to convert those calls to digital signals that are carried over the Internet. Since most smartphones don’t currently support voice over LTE, carriers that launch LTE voice services also need to build “inter-working functions” that allow LTE calls to connect with older phone technology. They also need to build out network infrastructure to solve what he calls the “particularly complicated” problem of making sure their networks can maintain calls when a subscriber moves out of, or into, an LTE service area, since LTE coverage is still typically only available in urban markets throughout most of Europe and Asia. Warren said the cost of obtaining and installing the equipment needed to solve these problems is one of the main reasons more wireless carriers haven’t yet rolled out LTE voice. He said many operators are waiting until that equipment is cheaper and more widely available before they plan their deployments. “I think we’re in a position where it’s about critical mass,” he said. “It’s the classic adoption of technology that we see repeated in telecom. There’s a definite kind of an inflection point.” Currently, there are four carriers globally that offer LTE voice services. South Korean operators SK Telecom Co. Ltd., Korea Telecom, and LG UPlus Corp. (an LG Corp. subsidiary) completed a “coordinated” launch of the world’s first voice over LTE network services last summer, while U.S. carrier MetroPCS (now owned by Deutsche Telekom AG subsidiary T-Mobile USA) also launched its own LTE voice network last year. State-owned China Mobile Ltd., the largest mobile operator in the world with more than 735 million subscribers, has announced plans to roll out LTE voice services in the first half of 2014, as have large U.S. carriers Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. Warren said those deployments will drive down equipment costs for other carriers rolling out LTE voice and help solve shared “teething problems,” opening the door for smaller carriers to launch their own voice over LTE services. That will likely include Canadian carriers, which are expected to launch voice over LTE services sometime in 2015 or early 2016, Duncan Stewart, director of technology, media and telecom at Deloitte Canada, said in an interview. Stewart said carriers with congested networks will reap the greatest benefit from voice over LTE, which can carry roughly twice as many calls as earlier technologies over the same amount of wireless airwaves. Moving voice traffic onto LTE networks will also allow carriers to “refarm” the airwaves they use to support older network technologies by replacing them with expanded LTE operations. In the meantime, he said, carriers will keep operating those older and less cost-efficient networks to carry voice calls. “That’s the big driver from the perspective of the carrier,” said Stewart, who compared the older network technologies to a pebble caught in your shoe when you head out for a long walk. “You’re going to have to remove it at some point,” he said. “Maybe it’s a round pebble and you can live with it for a while, but at some point, 20 years from now or 10 years from now, there will no longer be separate voice and data networks.” Bruce Kirby, vice-president of strategy and business development at Canadian new entrant carrier Public Mobile Inc., said most carriers see a single, LTE network running across all of their wireless spectrum as “the ultimate end point” once LTE voice is more widely available. He noted that the cost of running separate networks will eventually outweigh the costs of replacing older technologies. “On the scale of a large Canadian carrier, it probably comes out in the millions ,” he said. Warren said carriers could also dedicate their older networks to less data-intensive services, such as carrying wireless signals involved in running machine-to-machine technologies. “You may not refarm everything on 2G, but you may refarm a lot because there’s very clearly a very strong demand for the bandwidth that LTE delivers,” he said. Fran Shammo, Verizon’s chief financial officer, said at a Boston, Mass. technology conference Tuesday that consumers can also expect to benefit from voice over LTE technology, which will offer features such as video calling, video voicemail, and video address books. It will also offer high-definition calling, he said, a feature that will improve mobile call quality and set it apart from other Internet-based calling services such as Skype. LTE voice could also offer other services and application that we can’t yet imagine, Stewart said “Until the technology is widely deployed, nobody’s developed the apps for it,” he noted. Warren said he believes all mobile calls will be carried on an LTE network eventually, allowing smartphone manufacturers to stop making phones with multiple chipsets and antennas to support signals carried on other network technologies. The end result, he said, will be cheaper phones and more cost-efficient mobile services. “LTE is a very economic way of offering voice,” Warren said. “The global trend is towards voice over LTE. You will find very few operators saying that they’re not going to head in that path … I can’t think of any offhand.” —With reporting by Nicholas Kyonka at nkyonka@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

Taking that pebble out of your shoe, and the move to LTE voice

News | August 14, 2013

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Taking that pebble out of your shoe, and the move to LTE voice

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