AT&T is planning to offer voice roaming on the 700 MHz spectrum only after rolling out VoLTE, according to Bidness Etc.
The carrier made the announcement in a conference call with the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau about its efforts to support interoperability on the 700 MHz spectrum. AT&T had made comments to that effect in a progress report last month.
The FCC (News - Alert) had ordered the conference call to offer AT&T an opportunity to clarify its comments in the report.
AT&T said that it eventually plans to support interoperability in Band Class 12 and Band Class 17. The company said that the reason to wait until VoLTE had been rolled out was that the other carriers still used circuit-switched calls instead of the packet-switched calls that VoLTE uses. AT&T does support data roaming over LTE (News - Alert).
“For CDMA operators, we would be able to support LTE Data Roaming but since voice is handled on the 2G CDMA network, there is no opportunity for AT&T (News - Alert) to offer voice roaming until we support VoLTE,” AT&T vice president of services Joseph Marx said. “The staff also asked about SMS Texting while roaming on LTE data only and at this point it isn't clear that we'd be able to support SMS while roaming on the LTE data network.”
So far, AT&T has rolled out LTE in Wisconsin, Washington, Virginia, Utah, Texas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Ohio, Nevada, Minnesota, Michigan, Maryland, Indiana, Illinois, Georgia, and the District of Columbia. The carrier did not say when it would complete the rollout across the entire U.S.
The lack of support for interoperability could hamper the adoption by customers, leading to carriers not building out LTE connectivity in turn. AT&T did say in the report that it planned to schedule interoperability testing sometime in the future while still supporting LTE data roaming.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson