VoLTE will NOT take off in 2012: ABI

BANGALORE, INDIA: 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks continue to roll-out around the world. At the moment, however, these networks are providing data-only service. Industry players introduced the One Voice Initiative in 2009 to support voice services over LTE, and the GSM Association (GSMA) adopted this as the official VoLTE initiative in 2010.

In February 2011, Verizon Wireless demonstrated VoLTE at the GSM World Congress and announced plans for commercial VoLTE service in the US sometime in 2012.

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More recently, MetroPCS in the US has announced plans to be “among the first mobile operators to deploy VoLTE” in 2012, and LG U+ in Korea also announced that it will be a “first mover” in VoLTE next year.

So it looks like 2012 will be a big year for VoLTE deployments, right?

Not really. Verizon will certainly launch VoLTE sometime in 2012, and probably MetroPCS, LG U+, and a few other operators as well, however, nobody has committed any specific dates. There really isn’t any customer demand for VoLTE, much less a compelling business case, however, Verizon wants bragging rights as the industry leader in 4G.

Similarly, MetroPCS was quick to become one of the first operators in the world to launch LTE commercial service (in September 2010), and they want to be “one of the first” with VoLTE too, because you need something to advertise when you are #5 in the US market and far behind the big three.

And LG U+ is #3 out of 3 operators in the Korean market, so they are looking for something to grab attention too.

The fact is that 3G networks are extremely efficient at carrying voice traffic and provide extremely good voice quality. 4G networks support much higher data rates than 3G technologies, however, the net throughput is not much higher than 3G, so there really isn’t much technical benefit to moving voice traffic onto LTE.

The cost of installing IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) equipment to support VoLTE is not cheap. And, as always with new mobile technologies, we have a chicken-and-egg situation with the availability of phones that will support VoLTE.

Of course, there are other reasons for operators to install IMS. The Rich Communication Suite (RCS) and other IMS features, combined with the high data rates of LTE access, will enable operators to create new revenue streams and compete with over the top (OTT) providers.

Some forward-looking operators might introduce VoLTE in 2012 to take advantage of these IMS features. However, most operators are not leaders; they are followers, who will wait until 2013 or later. After all, IMS has been around for more than ten years and most operators still have not deployed IMS yet.

So, a few operators will commercially launch VoLTE in 2012, either for pride or for IMS. They won’t see much VoLTE traffic until significant numbers of VoLTE capable phones make their way into subscribers’ hands. The majority of operators will continue to deploy LTE for data only and keep VoLTE in their plans for 2013 or later.