The Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) has recently updated the statistics on LTE global implementations, as well as giving an overview of VoLTE(Voice over LTE) and LTE-A usage. For VoLTE development and deployment live, the biggest success has come in the Far East.
There have been 16 live VoLTE international rollouts up to April 2015, and of this number, a staggering 11 belong to operators from South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. The most recent mobile operator to join this club is M1, which is from Singapore. Every MNO in the region can now offer its customers a VoLTE calling service along with LTE-A.
M1 has stated that its LTE-A network has a capacity of downloading speeds of up to 300Mbps. The integration between M1’s 3G and 4G networks will bring better reliability and perfect voice quality delivered seamlessly.
The Far East looks like it is at the forefront for both VoLTE and LTE-A. In fact, the only launch out of the 16 that is from a European operator has been Vodafone in Germany. In the US, there are three firms that have gone live with this HD voice system. These are T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon.
The GSA also highlighted that LTE has been commercially launched in 138 countries by 393 operators. Of these launches, 107 have taken place within the last year. Carrier aggregation LTE-A deployments are still a big trend for 116 operators, with 64 already having started LTE-A in 39 countries.
Talking about this trend, the President of GSA, Alan Hadden, said: “Interest in VoLTE has surged and over twice as many operators are investing in VoLTE compared to a year ago.”
“16 operators have launched HD voice service enabled by VoLTE in seven countries, compared to only three launched in March 2014. Many more launches will happen in 2015.”
The VoLTE race is on in Europe with Vodafone being one of the frontrunners along with EE and Telefónica (Germany).