Claudia Bacco, Managing Director – EMEA for RCR Wireless News, has spent her entire career in telecom, IT and security. Having experience as an operator, software and hardware vendor and as a well-known industry analyst, she has many opinions on the market. She’ll be sharing those opinions along with ongoing trend analysis for RCR Wireless News.
It’s that time of year when everyone does their year-end wrap ups and next year’s predictions, so I thought this would be a good time to take a look back at some of the developments in LTE throughout this past year. There were many firsts in LTE this year and sometimes we tend to forget these highlights as time progresses.
VoLTE is happening in a real way
In May, SingTel launched the first full-featured VoLTE service, ClearVoice. This service is available to existing postpaid customers at no additional costs and will work within their existing contract parameters. What does full-featured actually mean in this context? A full suite of voice functionality including things like call waiting and call forwarding features. One interesting note is that calls connect in two seconds, which is five times faster than traditional mobile networks.
In June, KT and China Mobile launched the first cross-border roaming agreement for VoLTE. Although this is the first international roaming VoLTE call, it does not appear to have met its initial launch timeline for commercial service in November.
Moving from this first call to a first trial in October, China Mobile and KPN joined the conversation with the first international roaming VoLTE trial. Supported by KPN’s subsidiary IBasis, only a single connection to the multiservice IPX is required to access the international landscape. IBasis also provides a VoLTE test environment with interconnection and test locations around the world. Operators can utilize this functionality to prepare for upcoming commercial launches.
And in November, Verizon and AT&T announced work toward VoLTE interoperability. Both operators have announced rollout plans in their respective markets with the interoperability between their customers expected to come in 2015.
LTE-A on the horizon
In May, Telstra announced the first 450 megabit per second data transfer in a production network. The downlink speed utilized 60 megahertz of spectrum; 20-megahertz LTE carrier in the 1800 MHz band; and a pair of 20-megahertz LTE carriers in the 2600 MHz band. The Category 9 LTE devices were supplied by Aeroflex. What’s different about this trial vs. others is the data transfer rate achieved. Since this time other operators can also claim this achievement.
Everyone seems to be jumping on this bandwagon. Trials abound across all geographies with Sunrise, Elisa, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Orange, China Mobile, Etisalat and O2 (among many others) all conducting some form of trial of LTE-A in specific markets within their territories.
As far as LTE-A deployments, the news is also widespread. MegaFon, AT&T Mobility, SingTel, Swisscom, T-Mobile US, Vodafone and Movistar all launched in specific markets during the year with many others making deployment announcements. Again, this is not an exhaustive list.
Happy birthday LTE
Five years ago Teliasonera launched the first LTE network in Stockholm and Oslo. Today LTE traffic accounts for more then half of their mobile network traffic.
There’s been a great deal of activity related to LTE deployment across all regions of the world, and now we look to the future with VoLTE and LTE-A. As we move into 2015 we’ll also see an uptake on “5G.” As an industry, we always like to focus on the next big thing even though we haven’t conquered the key task at hand – LTE. But the forward momentum continues and 2015 should bring many new options to end users as a result of wider LTE availability and introduction of this next level of value-add services as a result.
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