KDDI customers set for access to Verizon VoLTE network this month, Verizon customers to be reciprocated capabilities later this year
Verizon Wireless customers may still lack formal nationwide voice-over-LTE roaming, but are expected to gain capabilities later this year when traveling to Japan.
Verizon Wireless and KDDI announced a deal providing VoLTE roaming capabilities set to begin this month. The initial move will see KDDI customers traveling to the U.S. having access to Verizon Wireless’ LTE network and roaming with compatible KDDI devices. The service is set to be reciprocated later this year when Verizon Wireless offers roaming capabilities for its customers traveling to Japan.
Verizon Wireless said it’s the first U.S. carrier to offer foreign travelers VoLTE roaming, claiming it has been testing the capability with multiple carriers.
Domestic roaming remains murky as carriers have only publicly announced limited capabilities, despite three of the market’s four nationwide operators claiming network-wide service.
AT&T Mobility late last year said it had begun support of cross-carrier service in “select areas,” which followed an announcement in late 2014 between AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless that they were working on cross-carrier interoperability, with T-Mobile US also adding it was working with those carriers to further interoperability. T-Mobile US claims more than half of its total voice traffic now travels over its LTE network.
Despite claimed benefits, reports suggest VoLTE services remain troubled. A report earlier this year from Amdocs found VoLTE users encounter three to four times as many dropped calls as they experience on legacy voice systems. The issues were said partly a function of coverage, but even more so due to radio access network issues, according to Konstantinos Stavropoulos, who is responsible for product marketing at Amdocs and an author of the report.
“The RAN-related issues for VoLTE were by far the highest factor that would contribute to these call drops,” Stavropoulos said. VoLTE often requires, as Amdocs put it, “aggressive tuning” for stability – meaning within about six months of deployment, operators can bring VoLTE to a state where call drops are within 20% of the rate seen on circuit-switched voice networks.
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