According to Sprint, it has remained on track to start the commercial roll out of its VoLTE, or Voice over Long Term Evolution (LTE), despite of an agreement that will have T-Mobile provide LTE roaming to Sprint for a span of four years.
The past year has seen Sprint conduct trials in VoLTE, including pre-seeding its subscriber base with mobile devices that come with support for the wireless technology. As pointed out by a spokesperson for the national wireless carrier, the current network offers top quality HD Voice service on an efficient 1x platform, and Sprint is targeting to reach that same level of quality with its VoLTE offering.
Now that T-Mobile has officially announced a mega merger agreement with Sprint, it is basically also embarking on a campaign to attract support for the tie up. As part of that campaign, the Uncarrier has struck a deal with Sprint to provide LTE roaming for the next four years. Even if the merger deal does not push through, the LTE roaming agreement will still have to honored.
With this LTE roaming deal now in place, some industry watchers were quick to wonder if Sprint would decide to go slow on its VoLTE efforts, especially now that it can depend on T-Mobile’s VoLTE. But Sprint has since reassured everybody that its VoLTE deployment will continue and be on track as previously expected.
Also, Neville Ray, the chief technical officer of T-Mobile, also further explained just this week that the focus of the Uncarrier’s LTE roaming deal with Sprint is data coverage and nothing more -- right now, mobile devices owned by subscribers of Sprint who are based in or around the locations covered by the LTE roaming deal could not do VoLTE, but only VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). It is worth mentioning that Sprint currently has underlying voice calling made available by way of CDMA.
T-Mobile is quite fond of showcasing its accomplishments when it comes to VoLTE. The third biggest wireless carrier in the United States is among the first in the country to roll out VoLTE, and its LTE network can boast of 100 percent VoLTE. This year, 80 percent of all of T-Mobile’s voice was carried over VoLTE. And some may remember that during the annual Mobile World Congress held earlier this year, it was announced that the Uncarrier played a part in the Ericsson Expert Analytics solution, which covers VoLTE, video calling over LTE, rich communication services, and mobile broadband.
