Voice and SMS over LTE

Voice Integral to LTE Offerings

"Operators should spend more time thinking about that value added service commonly known as voice ..." Alright, I thought when I started reading. We are on the same page.

At a recent presentation at CommunicAsia, Bryan Davies, director of marketing Alcatel Lucent continued with his message that voice is still the primary mobile money maker and a key component of a healthy mobile industry.

This is a similar message to what I've been blogging about here- voice is an integral part of any LTE offering, and it's important for operators to support it from launch.

If operators don't support voice, they are offering over the top competitors an open pipe to deliver competitive VoIP offers. And this is where VoLGA comes in and can prove its worth. It's available today, no waiting required, and provides operators a transition to IMS that will inevitably take time.

In the long term, yes, IMS is the plan . But LTE and more importantly LTE handsets are coming fast, and operators can't afford to launch without a viable voice system in place.

DT - Two VoLGA Systems Up and Running

Today Deutsche Telekom (aka T-Mobile) announced the "worlds first VoLGA call".  But really it was much more than that.  DT showed the mobile industry a couple things about VoLGA:

First, it's relatively to implement, especially for vendors with a background in UMA.  Not one, but two vendors stepped up with VoLGA Gateways, Alcatel-Lucent and Kineto.  Presumably Ericsson could do VoLGA too, as they have a UMA/GAN controller as well.  Remember, the VoLGA Forum went live in March 09, and here we are in December, just 9 months later, and there are two working systems.  

For devices, this will become doubly important.  Nearly all the major handset vendors (Nokia, Samsung, LGE, Sony/Ericsson, Motorola, HTC, RIM,...) have already implemented UMA/GAN.  Modifying and simplifying that implementation to an LTE device for VoLGA support is very straightforward.  

Second, for operators, VoLGA relatively easy to deploy.  Presumably DT doesn't have extra lab resources laying around to make a lot of changes to the core network.  The VoLGA Controller connects to an MSC through a standard 3G (Iu) interface.  Clearly for a commercial deployment, there would need to be some element management system, but to make calls, the VoLGA systems only needed an Iu interface.  Pretty simple. 

Third, DT now has ALL their mobile services running over LTE.  This isn't just 'dialtone', with years of additional work to actually turn 'dialtone' into a viable commercial mobile voice service.  This is T-Mobile's commercial mobile voice service running on LTE --  all the standard and wacky telephony features (call waiting, forward, transfer, hold, conference,...) as well as the revenue generating Intelligent Network applications like pre-paid, toll free, and LNP.  And certainly no need to run endless tests checking to see if the macro network 'falls back' the right way.  

It is clear that VoLGA is the interim (and first) step on the way to IMS voice.