After over a year of executive comments, AT&T has officially announced its launch of HD voice and voice over LTE (VoLTE) service. Four cities will be launched on May 23, with expansion to continue on a market-by-market basis.
In a short press release, AT&T framed the launch of VoLTE as "introducing High Definition (HD) Voice on an all-IP Voice Over LTE (VoLTE) network... you won't have to choose between faster data speeds and crystal clear conversations." Service will be available in "select areas" of Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota and Wisconsin – a rough doubling of earlier reports indicating a VoLTE launch in Chicago and Minneapolis.
AT&T said HD voice will be "enabled" on the Samsung Galaxy S4 mini, with more devices to come. There was no word or indication as to what or if any other AT&T LTE handsets currently in its customers’ hands support VoLTE, or if some of those handsets will support an over-the-air software upgrade for VoLTE.
It is clear from the release that AT&T does not plan to support HD voice on its existing 3G HSPA network. The party line from the AT&T rank-and-file has been bandwidth issues in supporting the roughly 12 Kbps for an HD voice call on an HSPA-based network, but there's also the unspoken marketing and network issues to get customers to upgrade from a legacy network onto LTE. HD voice provides an incentive for existing 3G HSPA customers and those with non-VoLTE phones to migrate sooner rather than later.
Today's event marks the latest in a series of high profile announcements for AT&T, including solicitations for municipal gigabit fiber deployments and an offer to buy DirecTV. It's a remarkable turnabout for a company that was being flogged for poor wireless coverage in some markets after it introduced the Apple iPhone.
Introducing VoLTE service in Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota and Wisconsin is a smart move. If there are initial problems, they are less likely to be evident to tech-centric (and high profile) media based in Silicon Valley and New York City, while a rollout in Chicago should be a known quantity given the city's long standing wireless associations through Motorola.
AT&T executives started talking up HD voice more than a year ago. I was at GENBAND's Perspectives 13 in May 2013 listening to AT&T's CTO discuss how wonderful HD would be, with an expected deployment later in the year, so there's been some delays in moving the technology to market.
If there's anyone left out of the HD voice party, it's Verizon. AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile US all have commercially available HD voice deployments in process. Verizon has been making noises about HD voice and VoLTE since early 2012 with suggested releases throughout 2013. The latest vague window is some time in 2014, but company officials can't be happy to be bested by AT&T.
Edited by
Alisen Downey 
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