VoLTE Prioritize Voice Communication Without Compromising Data Services
Voice communication remains indispensable in both personal and professional contexts despite the ongoing evolution of communication networks towards 5G, emphasizing increased data, video, and augmented and virtual reality capabilities. Despite the focus on advanced data and multimedia services, consumers still prioritize voice, considering it essential to any service bundle.
Voice over LTE (VoLTE) provides communications service providers (CSPs) with the opportunity to offer their customers voice and HD voice calls. Leveraging the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), VoLTE also facilitates standards-based rich communication services (RCS), encompassing multimedia features like video calling, file transfers, real-time language translation, and instant messaging. VoLTE establishes voice-over IP as the industry standard for commercial operators, marking a significant stride towards 5G voice integration.
Over the past decade, the adoption of VoLTE has steadily increased as handsets have evolved to support it. VoLTE support is nearly 100% in markets such as North America, and as it continues gaining traction, traditional 2G and 3G circuit-switched (CS) voice services are declining. Globally, VoLTE subscriptions surpassed 50 percent in 2021, with a projected compound annual growth rate of over 50 percent, leading the market to grow from $3.7 billion in 2020 to an estimated $137 billion by 2026.
The increasing demand for advanced services is helping to further the deployment of high-capacity, all-IP networks, with LTE as the primary mobile connectivity radio access technology. Being fully packet-based, LTE offers swifter access rates, reduced latency, and lower cost-per-transmitted-bit by optimizing network resources efficiently. This cost-effective capacity is crucial for meeting the surging demand for high-bandwidth services like mobile video.
VoLTE also ensures that subscribers’ data traffic remains within the LTE access network during voice calls without compromising the quality of their data services. It enhances spectrum utilization, particularly in densely populated urban areas, supporting twice the number of calls per MHz and three times the data throughput per MHz compared to earlier technologies.
How Does VoLTE Work?
To effectively leverage LTE’s communication and 4G voice capabilities, operators must focus on optimizing profitability while meeting subscribers’ increasing service demands within budget constraints. Consolidating voice and data networks to minimize delivery costs is an effective way to do this.
The Nokia VoLTE solution – comprised of IMS/TAS (Telephony Application Server), SBC (Session Border Controller), and HSS (Home Subscriber Server) – empowers operators to maximize the benefits of LTE networks while adhering to industry standards and seamlessly integrating with existing voice cores. With features like VoWiFi and converged IP for fixed services, operators can enhance user experiences and create differentiated service bundles.
Implementing VoLTE integrates voice services seamlessly into the LTE infrastructure, enhancing indoor coverage through Wi-Fi and extending communication capabilities via WebRTC. Both VoWiFi and WebRTC leverage the IMS core, aligning with VoLTE. This unified approach enables operators to provide a consistent range of communication and multimedia services across platforms.
LTE and 5G networks utilize IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) to route voice calls. Standardization by 3GPP dictates that 5G voice services will leverage the same IMS-based architecture used in VoLTE. As CS voice services diminish, VoLTE and IMS are the foundational infrastructure for all future voice calls. With the anticipation of network evolution to 5G, CSPs who have not yet deployed VoLTE to implement it in their LTE networks should consider doing so as quickly as possible.
Features and Benefits of Nokia’s VoLTE
From the user’s perspective, VoLTE offers several advantages over over-the-top (OTT) VoIP services. VoLTE calls set up more swiftly and deliver superior quality, especially when using HD voice. Additionally, VoLTE guarantees a deterministic quality of service with a guaranteed bit rate, unlike best-effort VoIP services. VoLTE terminals boast a talk time expected to surpass OTT VoIP by 150 percent, providing a richer end-user experience. When combined with Rich Communication Services (RCS), VoLTE enhances communication experiences by offering multimedia features, video telephony, and video chat.
Nokia IMS products are designed to be flexible, adaptable, and easy to implement. They offer seamless integration with best-of-breed partner products to effectively meet your business needs. VoLTE offers numerous benefits to your business:
Maintain and Expand Business: Enable HD voice and enhanced connectivity to ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty while attracting new clients.
Revenue Generation: Leverage IMS core for LTE to uphold revenue streams from current services, providing top-tier quality to your clientele.
Enhanced Customer Experience: Introduce a rich communications environment to voice services, enhancing mobile access and enriching customers’ daily lives.
Reduced Integration Risks: Offer a standardized and thoroughly tested end-to-end solution, minimizing integration risks and ensuring seamless operations.
Decreased Operational Costs: Utilize a unified core for all network access types and a common provisioning and management system, reducing operational expenses.
Network Evolution and Convergence: Evolve and converge your network to deliver voice and multimedia services across various access types, adapting to changing market demands.
Margin Optimization: Optimize your network to increase margins on voice traffic, elevate the customer experience, and prepare for the transition to an all-IP network.
Digital Content Enrichment: Enrich digital content through horizontal service integration, offering flexibility, adaptability, and ease of implementation.
Use Case | Supporting 155 Million Subscribers With VoLTE
One of the world’s largest VoLTE service providers, supporting over 155 million subscribers, spans the Indian sub-continent. Committed to delivering a top-notch experience, the CSP sought Nokia’s assistance to guarantee its clientele a seamless and uninterrupted service.
The Challenge | Supporting Communications During Large-Scale Disasters
Critical services such as the CSP’s Emergency Alerts Service, which enables subscribers to alert up to 10 loved ones with a single call, rely on the system’s availability even during disaster situations. Therefore, ensuring the reliability and security of these business- and mission-critical applications, particularly in times of disaster, is imperative. To address this need, the CSP partnered with Nokia to design a disaster recovery (DR) solution, guaranteeing the dependable delivery of its VoLTE services to all customers.
The CSP’s VoLTE core network spans India, with 12 hubs overseeing 22 circles. While each hub and circle is equipped with local redundancy measures, there is a potential risk of large-scale regional disasters impacting local operations. To mitigate this risk, the CSP sought Nokia’s assistance in implementing geo-redundancy, ensuring that failures in the core network and IMS server at a local level wouldn’t disrupt voice services for customers in that region.
The Solution | Creating A Disaster Recovery Core To Support All Core Network Functions
Nokia’s solution was crafted to establish N+1 redundancy, meaning that for all 12 hubs, an additional core would always be available to replace the failure of a single regional hub. This DR core, 12+1, encompasses all Nokia core network functions, including the IMS functions essential for VoLTE. In the event of a failure in one of CSP’s regional hubs, an automatic cutover to the redundant DR hub occurs seamlessly, preventing service interruptions.
During the project implementation, regional hubs failed, and the disaster recovery hub swiftly assumed responsibility for the failed hub’s live traffic, even before the final execution of the solution. It performed impeccably, demonstrating its reliability under real-life conditions. All 12 hubs are seamlessly integrated with the DR hub, ensuring enhanced resilience and continuity of service delivery.
The Nokia team capitalized on a suite of proprietary automation tools and project implementation protocols, ensuring the delivery of quality planning documents, expediting execution, and driving cost efficiencies throughout the project lifecycle. They also established a knowledge base, enabling lessons learned from integrating the initial hub to streamline subsequent implementations, resulting in an accelerated pace of deployment from two circles in the first two months to four to five circles per month in the end.
The collaborative efforts between Nokia Core Networks Global Services and the local CSP team facilitated the successful implementation of this project. While the solution’s scale and complexity were unprecedented, the Nokia team drew upon the expertise from previous customer implementations worldwide to design the CSP’s DR solution.
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