If you haven’t been following VoLGA media and analyst coverage as closely as I have, you may have missed some of the extraordinary comments made by objective journalists and industry analysts.
So don’t take it only from me that VoLGA is the most viable solution for solving the voice and SMS over LTE problem. Listen to them.
Yankee Group Research Director Brian Partridge has been quite verbose: “ VoLGA presents a viable way forward that doesn’t require a re-architecture of the network. VoLGA potentially provides LTE operators with a low-cost method of getting voice and SMS—the two highest drivers of mobile revenues—onto LTE,” he said. “One of the reasons you haven’t seen a lot of operators get behind VoLGA is because they are currently vetting a number of different solutions and gain nothing by publicly backing VoLGA at this stage in LTE's development. The work of the VoLGA Forum and the support of much of the LTE eco-system and T-Mobile will go a long way to ensure VoLGA gets a shot at providing the bridge that many LTE committed operators will require on the road to IMS.”
In a Wireless Week article, Partidge said: “Those bigwigs would love for it to be IMS out of the box, but that’s just not reality… I see it [ VoLGA] as being the most viable way forward that doesn’t require a re-architecture of the network. It’s a very low cost method of getting voice and SMS - the two highest drivers of revenue - onto the LTE network.”
He also said: “The reason you haven’t seen a lot of operators is because they haven’t studied it yet. The learning, the protocol, lack of disruption and sheer number of vendors points to me that VoLGA is the solution.”
Dean Bubley, industry analyst, consultant and blogger on Disruptive Wireless, wrote: “…But given the complete abdication by the vendor and standards bodies in sorting out voice/SMS over LTE in timely fashion (ie 3 years ago), it's [VoLGA] currently the best workaround I've seen. The fact that it's not even been included in 3GPP's release 9 workplan is ludicrous.”
He also wrote: “Nevertheless UMA[GAN]-over-LTE has various advantages in my mind, as the network side of UMA already "works" and is quite robust, with well-defined security gateways and testing and so forth. It supports SMS natively. It also doesn't rely on clunky fall-backs to HSPA or GSM, which may require the handset to switch to different frequency bands as well as technologies, and which could interrupt ongoing data applications. It also helps extend the life of the circuit core, which is good news for CFOs, but bad news for the IMS and RCS crews.”
During a Light Reading webinar, entitled Understanding the Voice and SMS over LTE Problem, Heavy Reading Senior Analyst Gabriel Brown said a few notable things: “Everyone knows voice is big business. Voice and SMS together are expected to be worth 80% of the total $800 billion a year mobile services market. Even 5 years from now, they’ll still account for 70% of revenue.” [source: Pyramid Research.]
“A good number of operators absolutely do want voice over LTE as soon as possible. For some, it’s almost a pre-requisite for investment in LTE. I’d certainly argue that, for the vast majority, voice support is a pre-requisite for broad network deployment and service rollout.”
“LTE is designed to support real-time applications. So the crux of the argument is that it will be better all around if the operators provide end users with a carrier-grade voice service.”
“CS Fallback is, I guess, what you could call the lowest common denominator. It’s almost like the get-out clause in that mobiles are actually forced off the network. It’s kind of cludgy to implement, and it’s the solution that no one really loves but in the end you might have to do.”
Martin Sauter, Wireless Moves, wrote: “From a complexity point of view, I think it [VoLGA] is much simpler than others described… since most, if not all changes have to be made on the gateway who's vendors I imagine are quite flexible and willing to do it very quickly.”
“With a strong list of supporters such as T-Mobile and Ericsson, just to name the two biggest (some more operators in the boat would be nice though), they [VoLGA Forum] have pledged to take the task of defining an interoperable voice solution for LTE outside of 3GPP.”
“I think it [ VoLGA] has a good chance of becoming THE voice solution for LTE.…VOLGA could thus be developed quite quickly as it's likely that existing products can be modified instead of being designed from scratch.”
Carrie Pawsey, senior research analyst with Ovum, wrote: "In an LTE world, it is still voice with web access that provides the greatest revenues....In addition, SMS will play a key role, not as a commercial messaging service but as an enabler for provisioning data services and roaming, and therefore should also not be forgotten.”
“Ovum forecasts that global mobile revenues will reach $1.11 billion in 2014, of which 69% will come from voice. Even in developed markets such as Western Europe, voice will still account for 65% of revenues in 2014.…We believe that voice will be important in an LTE world, as a data-only service will fast become a commodity. In addition, we believe that the business case is weakened if it is not supported on a single network.”
Zahid Ghadialy of 3G4G Blog, highlighted the importance of having voice over LTE: “Voice is becoming an important issue for seamless introduction of LTE services. Even though most people think that LTE will start with the Broadband Dongles, it is important to resolve the issue sooner rather than later.”
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