Following the trend that’s popping up in other regions worldwide, residents in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will be able to get high-definition voice calls on their mobile phones and voice over Wi-Fi from Mideast telecom giant du this year, it was announced this week.
Gulf News reported that Saleem Al Beloushi, EVP of network development and operation at du, made mention of the coming change while at the LTE (News - Alert) Mena 2015 conference. “Telecoms in the country will start utilizing LTE technology, a digital standard, to transmit voice calls over the existing cellular networks,” Gulf News said.
Al Beloushi’s reasons were as clear as the technology: “The voice over LTE [VoLTE] has better efficiency, HD clarity, [and] faster connection time, and overall cost per byte will be cheaper for consumers than on 3G network,” he noted.
There is a seamless transition these days when users switch from cellular networks like 2G and 3G, and this will now be the case with Wi-Fi, with Voice over Wi-Fi [VoWi-Fi] allowing users to move between their home Wi-Fi networks and their cellular network without disturbing the voice session, the report noted.
“In Wi-Fi, the cost per byte is cheaper and will further increase the infrastructure efficiency and offer a low-cost international roaming solution as users can make and receive mobile calls as if they were on their home network when connected to any Wi-Fi network,” Al Beloushi said.
The move to VoLTE is the next service that seemingly every major telecom carrier is working toward.
“VoLTE has already been launched in a few markets around the world. I don’t think they have decided on the pricing yet; they are going to make experiments to start with,” Matthew Reed, practice leader for Ovum (News - Alert) Middle East and Africa, told Gulf News.
“Treating voice like a data service on the 4G data network makes wireless providers’ networks operationally more efficient and free the spectrum to deploy more high-speed data services,” Reed added.
Edited by Dominick Sorrentino