VoLTE Whitewashing Smacks of Propaganda

Have you noticed the most recent wave of happy talk around Voice over LTE (VoLTE)?  I'm having flashbacks to the overstated wonders of IMS and LTE. U.S. carriers and telecommunications equipment manufacturers should be held to account for VoLTE optimistic promises. Instead, the industry seems to be in full Jedi mind trick mode as it tries to make people forget about continued delivery dates moved further into the future.

Exhibit A is a VoLTE blog posting out of NSN earlier this month. NSN Smart Labs tested VoLTE and OTT (over the top) VoIP solutions against four criteria: smartphone battery consumption, data connections, data volume/throughput, and signaling load. The winner was VoLTE; no big surprise, since NSN also happens to be a big LTE supplier around the globe.

VoLTE and OTT VoIP clients achieved similar MOS quality scores – an admission that should raise eyebrows, since carriers and vendors have been touting VoLTE as providing a superior call experience. However, OTT VoIP used more battery power to achieve quality and required higher bit rates "in general," generating up to 10 times more data connections in the mobile network than a VoLTE client during a call.

Complicating matters is that NSN's blog post doesn't name names in the OTT comparison, lumping all clients together. When it came to comparing clients, "most" OTT clients required between 20 and 40 percent more throughput than VoLTE clients during active calls, but "one" showed "exceptional performance and came close to VoLTE." 

Without a more granular comparison, it's hard to say if one poorly implemented OTT client skewed the data to favor VoLTE or if there's one "exceptional" client that needs just a bit more tweaking to delivery performance as well as a carrier-offered solution.

Exhibit B is the promotion of Rich Communication Services (RCS) and VoLTE together in one happy package.  If you have VoLTE, goes the parroted argument, RCS will do so much more. 

C'mon, really?

RCS is already running over in Europe without the alleged benefit of VoLTE. It's all happening on existing 3G HSPA networks, no LTE or VoLTE required, complete with all the bells and whistles of being able to do live video or IM and share files (basically URLs and street maps). Metaswitch Networks was doing RCS-like things years ago with its freebie client that escapes my memory at the moment on existing U.S. networks.

Can we all come to a consensus that LTE and VoLTE have been overpromised and under-delivered so far? When Verizon started talking up LTE, it painted visions of new business models where washers would have embedded LTE modems in them and manufacturers would be able to charge by the load -- ignoring minor details like not being able to get reception in the house or that perfectly fine landline broadband connection to deliver data to a manufacturer.

I'd also like to state what I believe is obvious: VoLTE isn't going to bring back revenue to carriers. I'm not willing to jump on the Andy Abramson "Voice will soon be/is free" bandwagon, but voice is a cheap and easy service compared to watching "Game of Thrones" via HBO Go. Voice minutes are effectively flat rate in the U.S. for a good chunk of the population and pennies per minute for the rest. International calling is typically measured in pennies, nickels, and dimes when it's not flat rate through some bypass plan.

The only driver AT&T and Verizon have for implementing VoLTE is cost savings. Operate a single IP wireless network for voice and data on LTE, shutdown the existing CDMA and 3G GSM networks and all the legacy gear associated with it, save tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per year in operational expense costs. Neither company seems to be in a big hurry to get there, so there's still a lot of margin flowing off the existing 3G networks.