Voice and SMS over LTE

VoLGA is dead… Long live Rhine?!?!!?

 Not surprisingly, Deutsche Telekom finally capitulated to the ‘rest of the industry,’ declaring they too would follow the path of CS-Fallback and on to IMS (VoLTE) for voice over LTE.  

Followers of the site already know the facts:  

• The VoLGA specs have been done for nearly 18 months now.  
• VoLGA systems were demonstrated at MWC 2010 (a year ago).
• VoLGA systems demonstrated support for ALL circuit services, plus all those ‘crazy’ advanced services like pre-paid, plus all those ‘boring’ USSD network services.
• VoLGA support in the handset is extremely simple.
• VoLGA is practically built in to the handsets Kineto is supporting with Smart Wi-Fi today.

But that’s not why I wanted to write this post.  There are three trends which lead me to believe that while VoLGA may be ‘dead’ today, there’s a new river preparing to rise up.  

First, in nearly every meeting with vendors involved with bringing voice over LTE devices to market, there was a universal look of panic/dread/despair.  It seems that while these vendors keep up a good front to their perspective (and current) customers, when talking off-the-record, it’s clear there are some major issues with CS-Fallback (not really a surprise), and that IMS is a lot farther away than anyone really wants so say.  

Second, we’re starting to have the panic discussions with the mid/low level folks at the service providers – the people who actually have to do the work.  They are under the gun to deliver something that looks increasingly difficult.  Who knew you may have to align your LTE cell plan with GSM cells to meet acceptable handover delays?  Who knew that you end up with a much higher signaling load on the HLR with CS-Fallback?  Who new you needed to upgrade your existing GSM MSCs to support CS-Fallback?  Who knew that ‘falling back’ to GSM would introduce unacceptable levels of call drops?  

Finally, I was amazed at the number of analysts who came by to say “Don’t worry, ‘VoLGA’ may be dead, but the concept is still the fastest, cheapest voice solution for LTE.”   “Just wait,” they said. “Give the industry another year or two to really work into a panic, and then re-launch it as a different river…”  

There is no doubt in my mind that VoLGA is the fastest, cheapest, most effective way to deliver voice over LTE.  While we’re waiting, I think I’ll start exploring other rivers in Europe.  

 

Metro PCS - the first LTE smartphone?

As reported by Light Reading, apparently Metro PCS, a regional CDMA service provider in the US, could be getting an LTE smartphone from Samsung as early as this year.

Some caveats:

Of course there is no IMS telephony, so Metro PCS must do an interim solution for voice. As a CDMA operator, their only choice is CS Fallback.

VoLGA, the low-cost, low impact solution for providing simultaneous voice and data over LTE, has not been defined for CDMA networks. Do you want to guess what Verizon will offer too?

It looks like AT&T is going to be able to continue to advertise their advanage of being able to "talk and surf the web at the same time" for a little bit longer.

Another opinion of CS Fallback

Dean Bubley of Disruptive Analysis recently published a paper on CSFB.  Over the years, Dean has been a pretty good prognosticator of technology.  In this case, he’s negative on CSFB, and positive on VoLGA.  Given that’s how I see it, it doesn't seem to be that “disruptive" an analysis.