Will 2014 be "the year of VoLTE"?

Greetings to all. Today we have a somewhat unusual post for the blog Yota: translation of a foreign publication . The thoughts stated in it seemed to us interesting and relevant, in many respects consonant with our vision of the situation around VoLTE. And it is very interesting to evaluate the experience of large foreign operators, what nuances of implementation they face or may face. With some estimates, we do not agree, but the material is still very interesting. After all, the analysis of the experience of the pioneers will allow other operators to take into account possible risks and not make the same mistakes. Welcome under cat.

Perhaps, one of the most significant events in the field of telecom, which had escaped the public view earlier this year, was AT & T's message that they were expecting “mass introduction of VoLTE on the market” by 2015. This is extremely significant for the technology, whose launch was scheduled for 2014 (occurred on May 23), and mass distribution - in 2015. AT & T is opposed by T-Mobile, which also launched VoLTE in May of this year. The decision of these two giants of the American telecommunications market to launch a high-quality voice service is the main support for VoLTE technology itself. Taking into account the level of investment and the aggressive deployment of LTE, we can assume that AT & T and E-Mobile decided to focus on LTE as the main protocol for voice services.

Money

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Given the activity of the operators, it seems that the separate existence of voice services in the CS domain and data services in the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) of the LTE network will soon become a thing of the past. Operators are constantly looking for ways to reduce operating costs, and equipment suppliers are advertising very impressive ways of saving by sending both voice and data over the LTE network. Savings can reach 60% of the level of operating costs and costs of maintaining equipment, 75% of the level of costs of maintaining infrastructure facilities and 65% of the level of energy costs. Add to this the improvement in spectral efficiency (doubled compared to 3G / HSPA and 6 times compared to GSM) - and you will get very good reasons for the introduction of VoLTE.

Sound

But it's not just about saving costs. Korean operator SK Telekom, the first to introduce VoLTE, said that this technology can greatly improve the sound quality (the frequency range is 2.2 times wider than when transmitting on a 3G network), and also reduces the call time to 0.25-2. 5 seconds (against 5 seconds in 3G). It should be noted that SK Telekom has more than 4.5 million subscribers using the VoLTE service , which they advertised as HD voice, so if they talk about improving the quality of voice communication, then they should be believed.

Timing

Given the pace of commissioning LTE networks and the growing fleet of 4G devices, VoLTE will have a very powerful foundation. Research company Telecoms.com Intelligence recently conducted a survey ( source ), which showed that the vast majority of operators plan to implement VoLTE within the next two years after the launch of LTE. Judging by the news regarding the activity of AT & T and T-Mobile, the two-year period seems to be a fairly accurate estimate.

Difficulties

In terms of billing and business support systems (BSS), the introduction of VoLTE will require the resolution of a number of issues. Firstly, the majority of operators will charge VoLTE calls on the same principle as voice: start and end time, calling and receiving numbers, national call, international, etc. But since VoLTE-calls are an effective way to send “voice” over a data network, in accounting and billing systems you will not have to take into account the amount of transmitted data, but instead switch to voice call accounting algorithms.

Secondly, quite unexpectedly, but for VoLTE-calls you will have to use QoS. The fact is that the resources allocated for each VoLTE call may change unpredictably, so the policy management system will have to dynamically control these resources to ensure high sound quality. And here there is one problem: the research firm Heavy Reading interviewed 80 operators regarding the future management of policies (Survey Results ). 60% of surveyed companies reported that their policy management systems need to be updated in order to be used in VoLTE, and 10% said that even updating will not solve problems and they will have to completely change existing systems.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, this is not new. We occasionally witness how mobile products are being introduced with the initial promise of free service. Often, altruistic marketing is behind this, but occasionally it becomes a consequence of the lack of readiness of business support systems. For example, when billing cannot collect and charge the necessary information.

So if the operators are going to bring VoLTE to the market as a high-quality voice service (as some have already done), then they will have to make sure that they can really provide the promised quality. A feature of VoLTE is the use of QoS for each call, and policy management systems should be able to do this from the very beginning.

- As we have said, we do not agree with all the theses and concerns. But we are interested to hear the opinion of Russian experts regarding the prospects for introducing VoLTE in Russia. What, from your point of view, are possible deadlines, major difficulties? Do you agree with the opinions and conclusions outlined above?