AT&T is once again on the record saying it will deliver HD voice via LTE later in 2014. Everyone else in the telecom media space is happy to give the company a free pass on its HD voice pronouncements in 2013. I think it’s getting old and past time for AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon to come clean with the reasons why they have not delivered on their wireless promises.
The latest “it’s coming” statement was made by AT&T Wireless CEO Ralph de la Vega at a developers’ conference out in Las Vegas just before the start of International CES 2014. De la Vega said the Asus Padfone X will be the first device to support Voice over LTE (VoLTE) and that was about all.
Last year, AT&T said it would be delivering HD voice via VoLTE in the third quarter of 2013, and it came from plenty of executives making the rounds of various events and investor conferences. In October 2013, the company said that it “might” have a VoLTE-compliant device out by the end of year.
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VoLTE has proven itself to be elusive for Verizon as well. The carrier started making noises as early as Mobile World Congress 2011 that it would be bringing VoLTE and high quality calls. Demos took place on 2011-vintage handsets and everyone has known that LTE handsets would have to support VoLTE back then, so one has to wonder what the big holdup has been.
South Korea has been happily running VoLTE since August 2012 – call it just about a year and a half – with millions of users running across three carriers. You can be sure that any Asian handset manufacturer already supports VoLTE, with the rest of the world’s newer/newest LTE handsets just as capable.
The sad part of this whole mess is that nobody has been held accountable. No U.S. wireless carrier has lost market share or paid a penalty for failing to deliver HD voice. Nobody has been fired for either overpromising service delivery dates or engineering shortcomings. The technology and telecom media has done little more but blindly repeat press releases and public statements on HD voice without going back and asking why carriers haven’t met their representations.
T-Mobile has had HD voice running on its HSPA network for close to a year, so the question should be asked: What’s so special about T-Mobile that AT&T can’t duplicate? AT&T could have had HD voice on its 3G network any number of years ago, but chose not to implement it. Verizon should also roll out VoLTE this year while Sprint may take as long as 2016 to get LTE.
I’m almost convinced AT&T and Verizon will manage to get VoLTE running by the end of the year. Both carriers want to shut down their legacy networks to simplify operations and to free up spectrum for refarming. But there’s also the possibility of further delays, because we really don’t know what the hold-ups have been for both companies.
Edited by
Alisen Downey 
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