The Price of Admission to LTE = IMS

It appears that the price of admission to the LTE club is IMS.  

I’ve said before that one can’t build an LTE phone without providing a mechanism to make a phone call.

Now that the industry has ‘standardized’ on IMS (aka VOLTE), mobile operators are compelled to invest in an entirely new voice infrastructure so subscribers can make calls when attached to LTE.  

Never mind that the new infrastructure works *only* when the phone is on LTE, and that the ‘old’ voice network, which carries trillions of voice minutes a year, will still have be maintained.  

LTE is for big service providers with deep pockets, and the price just went up.