Ericsson has announced that the French carrier Bouygues Telecom has chosen its equipment to launch new 4G and VoLTE services in the country.
“With the combination of our leadership in both technology and services we are now supporting Bouygues Telecom in its latest move to improve network and service quality for French customers,” Ericsson (News - Alert) France Franck Bouétard said. He said that Bouygues and Ericsson had already been working together for years.
One of the major components that Ericsson will deploy is HD Voice, which takes advantage of the greater bandwidth and processing power on new smartphones to make voice conversations sound more natural and reduce background noise.
Customers will also have shorter call set-up times and other IP features including video calls over LTE (News - Alert). They’ll also be able to make HD voice calls while using the 4G/LTE network at the same time. The network will also be more reliable.
Ericsson will allow Bouygues to offer advanced 4G features by completing the installation of IP Multimedia Subsystem (News - Alert) (IMS) network integration in a multi-vendor network. Ericsson will provide its Multimedia Telephony Application Server, Session Border Gateway (News - Alert), Home Subscriber Server and Ericsson User Profile Gateway, as well as upgrades to its Ericsson LTE radio access network and Ericsson Evolved Packet Core.
"Bouygues Telecom is proving the capabilities of its 4G/LTE network to support the latest advanced technologies and services,” Jean-Paul Arzel, head of the networks division of Bouygues Telecom, said. The carrier will start rolling out these new services in 2015 but will start carrying its first voice and video calls over LTE later this year.
Bouygues already covers 69 percent of the country with LTE services. The carrier chose Ericsson for its extensive experience in deploying LTE and its international experience.
Ericsson estimates that 65 percent of the world’s population will be covered by LTE by 2019.
Edited by Maurice Nagle