According to AT&T (News - Alert) Labs President Krish Prabhu, a smartphone able to use voice over LTE (VoLTE) is in the works and may be available during the upcoming holiday season. Prabhu made the statement at the PCIA wireless conference recently. The network needed to support the technology is currently being tested, and widespread availability of VoLTE smartphones is expected in 2014.
With VoLTE, voice calls are handled via data traffic, and would make previous generation voice technology obsolete. VoLTE calls have HD quality, as long as both phones support such technology. Prabhu also mentioned that AT&T currently handles six times more data traffic than it does voice traffic.
Presently, Verizon offers the most extensive coverage of LTE technology in its network, with most of the eastern half of the continental U.S. covered. AT&T is a distant second while Sprint (News - Alert) and T-Mobile have only a fraction of AT&T’s coverage.
Verizon may also be ahead of AT&T in having a VoLTE smartphone ready. The company long ago started testing its VoLTE network and expects to have a compatible phone ready early in 2014.
Globally, the LTE (News - Alert) market is starting to heat up. Although LTE Advanced is only beginning to be setup in the U.S., it’s already in use in South Korea, and a version of the Samsung (News - Alert) Galaxy S4 that supports LTE Advanced has been out a few months already. South Korea is also ahead of the U.S. in deploying VoLTE-enabled Galaxy 3S smartphones.
The overriding concern still has to be whether or not AT&T, Verizon and non-U.S. providers like SK Telecom (News - Alert) can get infrastructure setup to meet an expected surge in data demand that has shown no signs of letting up. Cisco recently predicted that Internet data traffic will increase 13-fold from 2012 to 2017. Monthly data use will reach 11.2 exabytes, or 134 exabytes per year. One exabyte is equivalent to a million terabytes. It would therefore take 132 million one-terabyte drives to store all the data that is expected to travel over mobile networks in 2017.
As a result, cautious optimism is in order. Mobile technology has advanced to unprecedented speed and quality levels, but without the infrastructure to support it, users will be frustrated like a Lamborghini driver stuck on the freeway during rush hour.
Edited by Blaise McNamee