Overcoming VoLTE: Deployment Challenges

Abstract

With Long Term Evolution (LTE) becoming the dominating access technology and smartphones becoming mainstream, the old core businesses of operators—voice and messaging—are being cannibalized by over-the-top content (OTT) providers. To counter declining voice revenues, Mobile Network Operators (MNO) have moved their investment to mobile broadband access even further. With the goal of maximizing the return on investment, they are working to simplify their networks and replace bandwidth inefficient 2/3G with LTE. However, before they can go down this path, MNOs need voice capability on LTE. VoLTE (Voice over LTE) is the most obvious choice to achieve this, but if not introduced at the right moment, it implies additional complexity and costs. The reason is that interworking towards legacy 2/3G networks is required until LTE coverage matches that of 2/3G.