As a consumer this is probably one of the most “ho-hum” technology changes in a long time. If you have a new phone you are probably already using VoLTE and didn’t even know it.
Voice over LTE or VoLTE allows a provider to have voice calls sent over the 4G LTE network. Sending voice traffic over a network designed for data has its fair share of challenges though, the largest being the “real time” nature of voice. Every voice call you make has to travel a very long way to get to its destination. Data networks are designed with multiple stops along the way to ensure that your data is going where you intended it to go. With data you barely notice these “stops” since a few milliseconds’ difference between emails doesn’t impact you all that much.
Delay is a terrible thing for voice traffic though. Imagine if you were waiting milliseconds between syllables in a verbal conversation. It would get annoying-and fast.
Providers had to make a lot of changes to their networks to overcome this challenge. Most of it is far too complex to get into on a forum like this. Just understand what an accomplishment it is that your provider made this change and you probably didn’t even notice.
Here are a few subtle things that do change with a VoLTE capable device.
Voice Quality: The sound quality of your voice calls may have improved. The amount of improvement will depend on your carrier.
Data Speed While On a Voice Call: If you like to talk and browse at the same time you should have noticed a big improvement in speed. When you were on a voice call on the old 3G network your data traffic was also sent on the 3G network so it was very slow compared to LTE. With 3G out of the picture this issue is gone.
Battery life: This is a bit of a pickle. You may have noticed a slight increase in battery life if you are using VoLTE. You may also have noticed a slight decrease in battery life. This comes down to the way different phone makers implemented support for VoLTE. It will improve as phone makers have more experience with it.
Call start up time: You may have noticed that calls get to the “ringing” stage much quicker in VoLTE. This is because calls are no longer routed to another network.
If you read through the article you can see why I called it a “ho-hum” advancement. For consumers it definitely was. For a provider it was a massive change and a big step forward.
Providers can now remove the 3G components from their network. This reduces costs in multiple areas. They can also reuse the Spectrum that they had devoted to it. This is a big thing as 5G will require a lot more Spectrum-a VERY expensive resource for a provider to purchase. In 2013 providers in Canada spent an estimated $5.27 billion on wireless Spectrum alone!
That’s a lot of money for something you can’t see eh?
NoShade's 