US Wireless Carriers Shifting To Voice Over LTE

jfruh writes "For years for cell phone companies, one specific kind of data — voice calls placed by dialing a traditional telephone number — was entirely different from all the other kinds of data a phone used. But in the U.S., that's finally starting to change, as all the major carriers are planning shifts to voice over LTE. The carriers promise sharper call quality and quicker connections."

Comments

Seamless fallback

[vigmeister]

Blindingly obvious to me is the fact that voice calls and SMS reaches me even without a high bandwidth 3G or faster data connection. If this leads to better network coverage for high speed data, I will be the first to celebrate, but until then I will stick to a split data/voice provider ... or one that can transition relatively seamlessly between the two types of networks...

Cheers!

Re:Will it count against the data?

[Bradmont]

Will it count against the data, or will it be counted per minute? Per byte sounds more reasonable.

Do you have any doubt that it will be counted as both?

Re:Yep, they're doing seamless feedback

[KeithJM]

They won't want to pay for both systems forever though. The reason you'd do something like is partly to make your customers happy, but partly because you realize you're installing two sets of hardware on each tower (one for data, one for telephone calls) and if you treated everything like data, you could save money on purchasing and maintaining the hardware because you'd only need to install one.

Re:Expose limits as unnecessary?

[timeOday]

What makes them different is time-sensitivity. Voice packets can't be delayed, even for a quarter-second, without making talking really annoying. Sure voice packets should still use the same protocol, but they need higher priority, and you would expect to pay less for lower priority stuff that isn't interactive - even streaming video can easily be buffered for a half-second to mask jitter.