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Verizon CTO Says 4G Service Is On Track
Verizon has announced that it is on track to roll out their new 4G LTE service using the 700 MHz band that it acquired in the recent FCC auction. Targeted first towards USB air cards for laptop customers, the service will be extended to cell phones and other mobile devices with embedded LTE eventually. Testing in Boston and Seattle should conclude in the next couple of months and commercial deployments should follow soon thereafter. "Lynch said getting voice to work over LTE has been particularly challenging. But that challenge is getting resolved as Verizon and other members of the GSMA announced Monday they are supporting a standard that uses IMS technology to deliver voice services over LTE. Still, more work needs to be done. Until a solution is complete, Verizon will use its CDMA network to provide voice services. And the LTE network will be used for data. Eventually, when voice over LTE becomes a reality, Verizon will use that technology. Verizon will also have to integrate EV-DO into its LTE offering to ensure that customers can switch to the 3G EV-DO network when the 4G LTE network is not available. Even though Verizon is being aggressive in building its network, it won't happen overnight."
So, everything is hunky-dory, going right according to plan.
But the phone company doesn't actually have any way of making the new technology make voice calls, so they'll be retaining the legacy CDMA technology. And, of course, they'll be building the intermediate legacy EV-DO technology for the forseeable future to deal with places where the new hotness is not actually available. Oh, and support for mobile devices is planned for "eventually"...
I wish my standards for success were this achievable.
If they used VoIP, they wouldn't be able to justify the price they charge the end users.
It is worth nothing that while LTE is still in development Sprint and Clearwire have already deployed 4G services that are operational and covering 30 million people in the US. Wimax is deployed in around 145 countries worldwide. Sprint will have a 4G device in 2Q or 3Q this year, and will likely have 120 million people covered by 4G before LTE is even deployed here.
Timing over a packet network is not trivial for voice or video...
VoIP over a cell network would be a bad idea. At least in the traditional sense. Yes, it works, barely, but it's like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. The problem stems from the fact that voip infrastructures are usually designed around a mostly reliable network, that very occasionally drops entire packets. A cell network is designed to cope with an unreliable network, where bit errors are common. Everything, from codecs to protocols are designed with that in mind. Is the reason why G729 can get the same quality at 8kbps as AMR at around 12kbps. The extra bits are there for redundancy. In addition to that, you definitely want traffic shaping and QoS guarantees when doing voice. Otherwise your neighbor's porn downloads might crowd out your calls. You don't really notice that in broadband based voip installations, simply because there's usually a ton of bandwidth to go around. But a shared radio connection is an entirely different ballgame.
They will probably use packet switching (read IP) on the backend though. Once the bits are safely tucked in some fat fiber pipes.
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
Get with it. Here in Nebraska we already have 4-H
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
That's the plan. LTE will use SIP with QoS to guarantee maximum latency and jitter. To all of the people saying you can't use VoIP: how stupid are you? Almost all voice calls in the western world go over packet switched networks and have for most of the last decade, and most of the last three decade in some cases. Do you think things magically get worse because those packets have an IP header? If you make a landline call anywhere in the UK or Canada, you are using VoIP.
The problem is that some of the standards for telephony services over LTE (which is an all-IP network) have not quite been finalised yet. This includes things like SMS bridges and the standards for mapping SIP addresses to phone numbers.
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According to Wiki, 4G is packet based only. It's assumed that by the time 4G is rolled out, IP4 addresses will have been exhausted. So does that mean all new 4G phones will use IP6 by default? Sounds like a good idea to me. If your going to make a move to IP6, handheld devices are the perfect place to start rolling out the new IP standard.
Life is not for the lazy.
No, I mean maximum latency. QoS guarantees a maximum latency, not a minimum latency for each packet. It doesn't need to guarantee a minimum latency; that is defined by the physical conditions of the network.
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