The future of voice over LTE

The communications landscape for operators is rapidly changing. Soon, voice over LTE (VoLTE) and video over LTE will dramatically improve customers’ communications experience. And this is just the beginning.

Since their launch in the late 1800s, telephony services have been serving most of the world’s population. Today, annual revenues from voice are estimated to be at around USD 600 billion. According to the latest Ericsson Mobility Report, mobile-data traffic doubled between Q3, 2011 and Q3, 2012, and it is expected to grow 12 times between 2012 and 2018, driven mainly by video. By mid-2012, LTE coverage was provided for an estimated 455 million people globally. Within five years, more than half the world’s population is expected to benefit from LTE coverage.

In this video, we provide examples of how successful voice services could evolve to offer seamless communication and data services in an all-IP mobile-broadband world. Ericsson’s network solutions can deliver these services today over LTE access with telecom-grade quality. Soon, these services will also be supported over HSPA and managed Wi-Fi with QoS.

VoLTE and video-calling over LTE has already been commercially launched in LTE smartphones, and the device industry is continuously developing new software clients to support these services over even more devices. Ericsson is working closely with device and chipset vendors to fully test and integrate communications services into any device with our end-to-end network portfolio.