Etisalat Completes Tests for LTE and eSRVCC

Etisalat, a prominent operator in the Middle East and the GCC's third largest corporation, has announced that it has successfully completed testing of Voice over LTE (VoLTE) and eSRVCC (enhanced Single Radio Call Continuity) features, Gulf News reports. The company can now provide more services to its subscribers over 4G LTE network, the first in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA).

Etisalat has said that thanks to VoLTE, its operators will be able to offer innovative voice services over the LTE network.

The company explained the process of the testing, highlighting that the test, “conducted along with Huawei, partner providing end-to-end networking solution, including radio access and core network,” said Etisalat in an official statement describing the achievement.

“VoLTE is the next standard of voice communication for telecom operators to be used in LTE network based on IP technology and eSRVCC technology,” Etisalat added in the statement, acknowledging that this new function will provide seamless voice services without any delay when LTE users move from LTE to 3G network.

The company maintains that “eSRVCC enables high quality voice with end-to-end quality of service (QoS) assurance. These new technologies provide High Definition (HD) voice service, faster call set-up, HD Video calling and rich media services.”

The director of Mobile Core for Etisalat, Mohammad Abdul Qadir, has spoken in the past about the proliferation of smartphones that support LTE and VoLTE along with the implementation of CSFB and SRVCC.

“It will be interesting to see how the introduction of popular handsets that are LTE capable will affect network performance and signaling load and what affect that will have on customer expectations,” Qadir said.

Etisalat is not alone in its projections pertaining to LTE networks. Digiworld Institute, a market analysis firm that specializes in the telecommunications, Internet and media industry markets, predicts that by 2016 a total of 830 million subscribers worldwide will have access to mobile data solutions through LTE networks.

Digiworld remarked that “innovative services and business models, such as investment/revenue sharing and VoLTE, which can bring benefits to both operators and subscribers, need to be deployed if operators are to maximize the potential of LTE deployment as the new LTE network enables a wide variety of high-performance mobile applications and multimedia, including video conferencing, high-definition content transmissions, high-speed video downloads, and social networking platforms.”