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?

ISDN flashback

[BaronM]

Once upon a time when 128Kbps BRI ISDN was fast, voice calls were frequently billed at a lower per-minute rate than data calls. To take advantage of this, a common trick was to place a voice call and then pass data over it. This did result in a lower data rate of 56Kbps per channel or 112Kbps overall, but if that was enough, you could save a lot of money.

Fast-forward to VOLTE.

Most wireless carriers offer unlimited voice minute plans. Since it's all going to be IP over LTE now, I have to wonder if there will a way to pass your data off as a 'voice' call and avoid data caps and limits? Not on a stock phone, but on a rooted device with a custom OS build, maybe?

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:Will it count against the data?

[Shakrai]

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

Stop with the FUD. Verizon doesn't double dip for MMS (picture messages use data, but they do not add to your data usage), even though such double dipping would likely go unnoticed, why would they do it for minutes?

There's plenty of legitimate things to bash the cellular carriers for without making shit up.

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.

Voice Doesn't Use Much Data

[billstewart]

I don't know the VoLTE protocols, but for regular PBX-style VOIP, the voice compression is good enough and the voice payload in the packets is small enough that most of the bandwidth is used for IP/UDP/RDP headers, not the actual voice. There are way too many standards to choose from, but most of them run about 5KB/sec or less (that's bytes, not bits), so about 300 KB/min, or about 3000 min for 1 GB. There are people who use that much voice time, but not many :-) I'd expect that for a while you'll see multiple different standards for handling hd-mobile-to-hd-mobile, sd-mobile-to-sd-mobile, mobile-to-wireline, mobile-to-other-mobile-carrier, etc.

Back around 1990, I went to a technology talk by a guy from MCI who thought that the conflicting economics of offering voice and video on the same network were going to be a serious problem for telcos - video at the time meant ~1.5-3 Mbps corporate teleconferencing, and either you could price video too high to sell much of it, or you could sell T1 bandwidth cheaply enough to make videoconferencing affordable, in which case you'd undercut your voice pricing because companies would buy your video T1s to interconnect their PBXs for cheap. Better video compression got us out of that hole for a few years (384kbps or especially 128kbps video didn't cause that much trouble), but the Internet came along and started doing the same technological undercutting, VOIP started becoming feasible, etc. Mobile phones gave us a way to charge lots of money per minute again, but Moore's Law is still relentless.

Disclaimer: I do work for AT&T, but I do computer security, not mobile phones, so I have no idea what they're planning to charge for this, this is my own opinion, not the company's, blah blah blah. On the other hand, I have been doing various kinds of telco things for many generations of technology :-)