The Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) is an organization that aims to promote the GSM, 3G, WCDMA, HSPA and LTE (News - Alert) mobile phone standards worldwide. The group represents suppliers, covering close to 100 percent of the mobile market share. It offers market intelligence, objective analysis and information.
A few days ago, the GSA (News - Alert) unveiled new statistics that it has gathered on worldwide LTE network rollouts that includes some insight into the deployments of LTE Advanced (LTE-A), a major enhancement of the LTE standard and Voice over LTE (VoLTE). VoLTE results in the voice service being delivered as data flows within the LTE data bearer. This means that there is no dependency on, or ultimately, requirement for the legacy circuit-switched voice network to be maintained. VoLTE has up to three times more voice and data capacity than 3G.
We are constantly seeing commercials on TV from the major U.S. carriers about who has the best, most reliable and farthest reaching LTE service in the country. However, if we look at the LTE statistics on a global level, South Korea leads the pack with 62 percent penetration, Japan at second place with 21.3 percent and the U.S. comes in fourth with 19 percent.
Taking these figures into consideration, it is not surprising that the Far East surpasses the rest of the world when it comes to global VoLTE rollouts. According to the GSA’s analysis, there have been 16 live global VoLTE rollouts to date, and 11 have taken place across Singapore, South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong.
Of the remaining five VoLTE rollouts, only one has taken place in Europe. Vodafone (News - Alert) Germany is the only telecom operator to launch any type of VoLTE services in the European market. The remaining four slots come to the four Tier 1 operators in the U.S. Over the past six months AT&T and Verizon (News - Alert) have been working together so that their subscribers can use the HD voice service on each other’s networks.
Alan Hadden, who is vice president of research at the GSA, made the following comments, “Interest in VoLTE has surged and over twice as many operators are investing in VoLTE compared to a year ago. 16 operators have launched HD voice service enabled by VoLTE in 7 countries, compared to only 3 launched in March 2014. Many more launches will happen in 2015.”
While the GSA has been gathering these statistics, something to take note of is the fact that at the end of 2013, China Mobile (News - Alert), the world's largest carrier, was set to spend as much as $13.4 billion to roll out the world's largest 4G network. This would provide access to its customers in Beijing, Shanghai, and 14 other cities. This was when the Chinese government award licenses to the three major telecom carriers to deliver 4G LTE standards also known as TD-LTE and Frequency Division Multiplexing, known as FDD-LTE, in China.
The GSA report states that over the past 12 months, operators in 107 countries have commercially launched LTE services, bringing the total of operators up to 393 in 138 countries. In addition, 64 operators having launched LTE-A in 39 countries.
If we take the figures supplied by the GSA’s report, we see that close to 70 percent of the VoLTE rollouts have taken place in the Far East, giving the rest of the world quite a bit of catching up to do.