AT&T begins the march toward LTE voice
AT&T Wireless released some interesting Long Term Evolution (LTE) news that could have an impact on the development of voice over LTE (VoLTE) for the public-safety community.
Last week during the 4G World trade show in Chicago, Kris Rinne, AT&T’s senior vice president, architecture and planning, said the operator plans to introduce VoLTE by 2013. (AT&T plans to roll out LTE next year.) It’s the first time a commercial operator has given any specific timeline for introduction of voice on the platform. And it’s some positive news for the public-safety community that is keen on leveraging commercial developments for its own LTE deployments.
Of course, the hope is that LTE could one day replace land mobile radio (LMR) systems, thus freeing up additional spectrum and resources for the public-safety community. The current version of LTE doesn’t support voice nor has it appeared that any commercial mobile operators were too keen on deploying it anytime soon.
It’s been well known that Verizon Wireless — a carrier with plans to roll out LTE in 38 markets before the end of the year — plans to rely on its circuit-switched networks to support voice services. Codec technology has advanced so much that voice traffic on circuit-switched networks has become significantly efficient.
But AT&T’s motivation may very well be to shut down some of its legacy networks, so it can reclaim more spectrum for broadband services. As such, we could see AT&T lead the way in fast-tracking VoLTE, which still isn’t fully standardized but will run over IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) technology. The IMS architecture, which on a basic level replaces an operator’s back-end network architecture with an all-IP system, is designed to make it easy to deploy services like SMS and voice via a VoIP-type service.
That’s not to say that public-safety networks can simply piggy-back off of commercial LTE deployments. There are more voice requirements such as talk-around, push-to-talk and one-to-many communications that are critical elements of any emergency voice system. But AT&T’s declaration will begin to set the wheels in motion. And, with the number of vendors that are beginning to woo the public-safety community, we could begin to see some real momentum in this area.
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