The Korean carrier LG Uplus announced that it has launched VoLTE roaming services, according to The Korean Herald.
“The successful launch of the VoLTE roaming services now allow LG Uplus subscribers to use these services while roaming abroad and will help the firm gain great momentum in developing next-generation roaming services,” an LG Uplus spokesperson told the paper.
LG Uplus will support roaming between its network and that of KDDI (News - Alert), a Japanese carrier. The company said that the roaming will connect calls 20 times faster than with 3G roaming.
While VoLTE roaming might be a reality in Korea and Japan, here in the states many LTE (News - Alert) customers are still waiting to be able to use voice roaming.
AT&T has said it will hold off on offering VoLTE roaming until it completes its own LTE network.
Support for VoLTE roaming seems to suffer from a “chicken and egg” problem, like a lot of new technologies do. Not that many people are using LTE yet, so carriers don’t want to invest in LTE roaming, hence fewer people adopt LTE.
While VoLTE offers many advantages over 3G voice, including better sound quality, it only works on certain handsets. Without roaming agreements, customers won’t invest in these devices if they’re not sure the other person on the end of the conversation can take advantage of the voice features.
LTE also faces stiff competition from over-the-top services that offer many of the same features over existing data plans.
This might be way LTE is taking off in areas outside of North America. LTE is proving to be particularly popular in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.
LG Uplus said that it planned to expand its own VoLTE roaming into other nations, but didn’t say which ones. The Asia-Pacific region, particularly Japan, was an early adopter of mobile phone technology already.