Voice and SMS over LTE

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. 

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.  

 

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.

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.

One on One: Franz Seiser Talks VoLGA

I recently had a chance to sit down with Franz Seiser, head of core network architecture for Deutsche Telekom, formerly T-Mobile International, to chat about voice and SMS over the LTE network. We discussed the evolution of LTE as it leads the industry down the path to IMS. Franz said that the industry consensus today is that IMS will be the longer-term solution, but it is still a ways off. An interim solution is necessary. Watch the video in which Franz and I briefly discuss steps and roadblocks to IMS; options for voice and SMS over LTE; and advantages for VoLGA.