Taqua (News - Alert), a supplier of small cell deployment solutions, has announced upgrades to its TCS6100 Small Cell Convergence (News - Alert) core. The upgraded core will allow providers to deploy several million additional subscribers. Carriers will also see increased flexibility for their deployments thanks to new Voice-over-WiFi (News - Alert) and Voice-over-LTE capabilities.

“Our customers are seeing strong demand for femtocells that require high capacity nodes to accommodate increased traffic by smartphones,” notes Scott Weidenfeller, Taqua’s CMO. “These new capacity updates will satisfy this growing demand, while our VoWiFi and VoLTE enhancements will provide additional deployment flexibility.”

With the TCS6100, carriers can expand their mobile network capacities without re-engineering their circuit-based mobile core. By combining macro network features with service layer interworking, the core allows providers to extend existing operations practices to its small cell offerings.

Taqua provides full solutions for voice and messaging over both LTE and WiFi, including necessary components like secure access and session control. Because of the great stress on networks thanks to the proliferation of smartphones and other mobile devices, carriers need options that allow them to offload some voice and messaging to local WiFi with handsets that leverage Taqua’s small cell core.

With this application, subscribers can utilize their existing wireless number and their existing calling plan features and functionality just as they do with their cellular service. Users won’t have to obtain a separate phone number or app for WiFi calls.

“Historically, VoWiFi offerings have required the subscriber to utilize a secondary number and additional software launched from their handset to launch or receive a call,” said Weidenfeller. “Taqua’s approach is to deliver the control of these calls from the operator’s small cell core with the TCS6100. The pre-loaded handset software will run in the background using VoWiFi and be completely transparent to the subscribers.”

Also, when an LTE (News - Alert) handset makes or receives voice calls, the TCS6100 will manage any falls back to the 2G/3G network in order to seamlessly complete the call. Enhanced circuit-switch fallback will enable circuit-switched voice and SMS to be delivered to LTE devices by setting up an interface between the legacy mobile switching center and the mobile management entity in the LTE core network.