Industry Leaders Support Voice Over LTE Standard
Posted by Jesse Ward on Monday, November 9, 2009 · 
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A group of telecom service and equipment providers are united in support of a new standard for delivering voice and messaging services over 4G long-term evolution (LTE) mobile networks.
Voice and SMS service delivery is a large issue for LTE because, as a packet-based network, it does not support legacy circuit-switched traffic. A number of different approaches to this technology conundrum have been introduced, without a consensus among operators about which solution is best.
Enter One Voice, an initiative backed by AT&T, France Telecom, Orange, Telefonica, TeliaSonera, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone, and equipment manufacturers Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson.
One Voice advocates using a standard version of the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) technology to route voice and SMS traffic between the IP and circuit-switched networks.
The companies said that they have “concluded that the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) based solution, as defined by 3GPP, is the most applicable approach to meeting the consumers’ expectations for service quality, reliability and availability when moving from existing circuit switched telephony services to IP-based LTE services. This approach will also open the path to service convergence, as IMS is able to simultaneously serve broadband wireline and LTE wireless networks.”
Two notable companies are absent form the list of aforementioned supporters: T-Mobile and Sprint. Sprint, of course, has invested in Clearwire’s WiMAX initiative.
T-Mobile, on the other hand, already has come out in support of another solution: voice over LTE via generic access (VoLGA). VoLGA separates mobile voice and messaging from the IP-based LTE network and puts it on the existing 3GPP Generic Access Network (GAN). Some view VoLGA as an intermediate step to IMS, a step which may be unnecessary if IMS can successfully manage VoIP traffic.
Read the release.
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