Mobile operators are moving to a data-centric world. LTE has become the most rapidly deployed cellular network technology in the industry’s history and the demise of circuit switching—while still on the distant horizon—is now in sight.

In the commercial infancy of LTE the industry has, for good reasons, focused on the improvements the technology can deliver to data access and services. But LTE is also the future of mobile voice, and the migration to this new evolutionary stage of speech communication has already begun.

For many years operators have neglected the development of voice services in favour of expansion and diversification. Failure to drive innovation in voice has allowed over the top (OTT) providers to launch more sophisticated services and threaten operators’ most fundamental offering.

The arrival of Voice over LTE (VoLTE) offers operators the chance to regain some ground through the development of a richer suite of integrated services. Perhaps more importantly, VoLTE is a crucial step towards greater efficiency in the network, both in terms of spectrum management and the number of network technologies operators need to maintain.

This whitepaper will argue that VoLTE creates a significant opportunity for operators, but warns that the evolution from existing voice services will place before them a number of serious challenges.

None of these are insurmountable but operators must seek out and develop the expertise to understand and address these challenges if they are to fully exploit the commercial and technical benefits inherent in VoLTE.

The paper draws on previously unseen data from a survey carried out by Telecoms.com Intelligence into of operators’ attitudes towards VoLTE and their plans for its introduction. There were more than 100 respondents to the survey, representing operators from around the world.