T-Mobile, Huawei and Qualcomm Eliminate Voice Handover Interruption from LTE to 3G

Three large players in the mobile market — T-Mobile, Huawei and Qualcomm — recently made a huge advancement for voice and video telephony over LTE, while strengthening mobile service with LTE as a whole. The advancement comes in the form of an LTE mobile data transfer standard which enables seamless handover from LTE to 3G/UMTS networks with no perceivable interruption for the user.

“This solution has enabled us to eliminate a number of previously insurmountable technical problems. Now that we have found a way to seamlessly switch to standard mobile telephone networks during the course of an active call, operators can rapidly move over to LTE technology while assuring continued customer satisfaction throughout Europe,” said Daniel Zhou, CEO of Huawei Austria.

This new 3GPP Rel. 10 standard is to be widely implemented throughout Europe, making the switch from LTE to standard mobile telephone networks perfectly smooth, a feat that was previously impossible. As such, Voice over LTE (VoLTE) technology will feature crystal clear call quality in addition to generally faster connection speeds.

Huawei contributed network switching technology to the project, while VoLTE test phones were based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 processor MSM8960 chipset.

“Our successful pilot project showed that not only rapid data transfer, but also Voice over LTE technology is ready for wide spread commercial use. Huawei and Qualcomm clearly proved their credentials and demonstrated their problem-solving expertise during the course of the venture with T-Mobile,” said T-Mobile Austria CTO Rudiger Koster.

Recently, Qualcomm entered into a license agreement with Semp Toshiba, the terms of which dictate that the former company has granted the latter a royalty-bearing patent license to develop, manufacture and sell 3G WCDMA and TD-SCDMA, as well as 4G OFDMA subscriber units.

Qualcomm's networking and connectivity subsidiary, Qualcomm Atheros, also recently unveiled the industry's first industrial-grade HomePlug Green PHY (HPGP) device, the QCA7000-AL3B.