Recent news in VoLTE (voice over LTE (News - Alert)) says that equipment supporting standardized mission-critical VoLTE should be commercially available in 2018.
Many telephony voice services are still operating on 2G and 3G systems, says Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) CTO Kenneth Budka. Some commercial carriers in the U.S. have deployed LTE for data services, but public safety officials will have to decide how to uphold land-mobile-radio (LMR) networks for mission-critical voice services while paying subscriber fees to a carrier or FirstNet to access an LTE network for data.
Running these two simultaneously is expensive at best, and so moving to one network for mission-critical services is optimal, but it all depends on the future of LTE.
“It would be much cheaper if you could do it on one network, provided that you can provide mission-critical services,” said Budka, according to Urgent Communications.
“If we did, in the future, have a FirstNet [LTE system] that was capable of providing voice services, the money that we currently spend on land mobile radio could be plunged into LTE. That means better coverage. That means a broader ecosystem. That means lower costs overall for taxpayers and better coverage for first responders and citizens.”
VoLTE offers significant advantages over the traditional voice infrastructure. Being able to offer high-definition voice and seamless call handoff among various LTE networks is just a small start. VoLTE has the capacity to allow users to use many multiple media applications involving voice, video and data simultaneously on their smart devices. Operators win by offering higher value added applications, in turn increasing the average revenue per user and maintaining a common core, thus reducing capital expenditures.
A government study conducted last year said that VoLTE offers clearer communications than what is being delivered by equipment currently used by first responders.
Infonetics Research (News - Alert) once forecasted that there would be 12 commercial VoLTE networks by the end of 2013, while Arc Chart predicts that the number of VoLTE users worldwide will stand at 74 million by 2016.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s Institute for Telecommunication Sciences found that in the majority of cases, VoLTE voice quality is superior to that of existing equipment. For obvious reasons the speed and clarity of LTE and VoLTE are vital to public safety practitioners.
There is no doubt that there are challenges ahead for VoLTE to be the “it” solution for public safety networks, but there is sufficient momentum that many of the current issues will be resolved before too long.
Edited by Alisen Downey