It's no secret that adoption of VoLTE has been on the rise for quite some time. In fact, according to a study from Dell'Oro Group released last August, VoLTE spending passed the $200 million mark as of the third quarter of 2012. However, at this point, it's still tough to say how the VoLTE market will look once it's more developed, but global technology services company Aricent Group (News - Alert) thinks that India will be the country to watch.
Specifically, the company predicts that India will have a higher percentage VoLTE customers compared to its total LTE (News - Alert) subscriber base than any other country in the world.
"We are going to see more niche operators coming and embracing VoLTE kind of solution. We are quite bullish about 4G and confident that it will not meet the fate of 3G deployment," Pratyush Dasgupta, Aricent's vice president and wireless practice head told Light Reading (News - Alert) India.
According to research from Arc Chart, the total number of VoLTE users worldwide will hit 74 million by 2016, accounting for one out of every 10 LTE subscribers. However, Aricent says that India is a unique market in this respect as it boasts 800 million mobile subscribers to date, all of whom are eager to access LTE speeds — largely because of its ability to facilitate video chatting.
Dasgupta pointed out that LTE will clear up bandwidth issues now standing in the way of important offerings, such as remote education and remote healthcare, both of which are highly relevant considering the number of rural and semi-urban areas throughout the country.
"With the kind of bandwidth that LTE would support, those set of services can be offered effectively. And since it is going to be on a handset, LTE is the only way to have high demanding video-application based services," said Dasgupta.
Aricent has invested heavily on supporting LTE rollouts as well as VoLTE and is currently working with leading OEMs — the company recently partnered with Mindspeed Technologies to launch a high-performing 20MHz small cell reference design, for example — toward this purpose. Still, for VoLTE to succeed, operators need to be open to collaboration as well, which U.S. carriers like AT&T (News - Alert) and Verizon seem reluctant to be.
Edited by Blaise McNamee