It has occurred to me that Voice over LTE (VoLTE) has skewed my thinking. The implementation of VoLTE on smart phones has the network operators isolated from the over-the-top implementations. Often, the argument against over-the-top solutions is the “poor quality” and lack of QoS aspersions. However, that rationale ignores the fact that their solution is in effect their own closed implementation of packetized voice. On the wireline side of the network, voice became incremental and bundled as unlimited. In the cellular network it stays segmented and pricey.
So it was a breath of fresh air to speak with Ashish Bhatia, Senior Enterprise Systems Engineer at Samsung Telecommunications America. While Ashish was talking about the implementation of the WLAN Controller WEC8500, we rapidly got on the subject of voice support and managing voice channels effectively. After all, a packet is a packet until its properties and requirements make it a priority. These days, voice and data should coexist on the same infrastructure with traffic shaping being done in various schemes. In Samsung’s case, this starts with Intelligent Beam Forming at the access point.
From there the Samsung Enterprise Solution uses the “Air Equalizer” which is expanded by their Voice Aware Traffic Scheduling [VaTS] solution to manage the voice network.
Properly managing the interface between the enterprise systems and the “off-net” cellular relationship often gets put to the side as the BYOD employee brings in his or her devices. The “Air Move” capabilities allow the seamless handoff for voice and data traffic.
Samsung’s WE Mobile Client enables the same full functionality as their IP phones.
All of this makes my point about packetized voice. Like the Web, the flow of voice traffic should be just as seamless when moving from the Internetwork between carriers, Wi-Fi, Wireline, Ethernet, etc. It should be everything over IP.
We can lose sight of that when technology implementations leave old business models in place. Distinguishing voice from data makes sense from a traffic-shaping point of view. It does not from a standpoint of pricing. The Samsung Wireless Enterprise includes the voice capabilities as part of the quality of service and does not suggest that a voice packet is doomed to poor quality.
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