Over 900 million global VoLTE connections by 2018: TechNavio

According to research firm TechNavio, the Global Voice Over LTE (VoLTE) Market is expected to witness a CAGR of 142.62% from 2014 to 2018.

“The mobile telecom operator’s voice revenues are declining as subscribers increasingly choose OTT VoIP services like Skype instead of regular circuit-switched services. However, VoLTE enables operators to stem the declining voice market share by offering high-end voice quality,” says Faisal Ghaus, Vice President of TechNavio.

“VoLTE will provide operators the opportunity to establish voice and video propositions that the OTT providers cannot match, with the provision of voicemail, roaming and interconnect services. It will also provide broader connectivity.”

The report names key vendors as Alcatel Lucent, AT&T, Ericsson, Huawei Technologies, KT, LG Uplus, Nokia Siemens Networks, SK Telecom, and T Mobile, and notes that while consumers want data together with voice services, telcos are still slow to set up LTE ecosystems. Technology-wise, voice over HSPA is dominating the industry.

TechNavio explains that VoLTE or Voice over Long Term Evolution is a technology that enables voice calls over an LTE (often called 4G) network, as opposed to earlier voice calls in use over 2G and 3G networks. Currently, operators run voice and data over two distinct networks. VoLTE enables them to merge both, which results in better quality and efficiency. 

Unlike voice over internet protocol (VoIP), used to support voice calls over a broadband connection by but which still sends voice data over circuit-switched networks, VoLTE sends voice calls over IP-based LTE networks. It is a three-step process, with voice signals converted into packet data for transfer over the broadband network, and then converted at the other end from  packet data into voice signals.