Two years ago I would not have speculated about UMTS being abandoned anytime soon. LTE was still relatively new and in Europe, UMTS was the main air interface technology for high speed mobile Internet access. But things have changed rapidly and LTE has taken over that role by storm. Today, most high-end and even mid-range … Continue reading How Much More Will UMTS Evolve In The Field Now That LTE Is Here?
When the Wideband AMR speech codec was activated in my 3G wireless network of choice a year or two ago I decided to lock my smartphone to 3G-only mode to prevent it being handed over to 2G when on the move and thus being downgraded to a narrowband channel. In the Cologne / Bonn area … Continue reading When Does 3G Get Patchy?
Back in 2011 I ran a post titled "Voice over IP – The Move Away from the Baseband" describing how Over-The-Top Voice over IP clients such as Skype do not run in the modem baseband chip as traditional circuit switched voice today but rather on the application processor as an application of Android or another … Continue reading Voicer over IP: The Move Back Into The Baseband
Let me make a bold assumption: Even in 10 years from now, people will still use their mobile device to call each other. Many other forms of communicating with each other have sprung up over the years, SMS, eMail, instant messaging, Skype video calling, Facebook, etc. etc. And I am a heavy user of most … Continue reading Telephony – 10 Years From Now – A Little Bit Of Everything?
One approach to deploying LTE without packet switched voice call functionality at the beginning is to instruct mobile devices to use a 2G and 3G network when the user makes or receives a voice call and return to LTE afterwards. This solution is referred to as CS fallback and has been specified in 3GPP TS … Continue reading CS-Fallback – An Introduction
Currently there are only three network operators in France but the launch of the fourth network operator ‘Free’ is imminent. Perhaps Free will be the last startup mobile network operator to launch in Europe with a network from scratch for the next decades as the trend in most other European countries is for network operators … Continue reading What Iliad/Free Could Do
With the industry now thinking about multimode/unified GSM, UMTS, LTE base stations (see this post from back in 2008) it is likely that as we go forward there will be little incentive to switch-off UMTS because of LTE becoming more prevalent. But just for the sake of the argument: What would have to happen before … Continue reading Preconditions for Switching UMTS Off
There is one thing, all current mobile Voice over IP approaches have in common, be they VoLTE, VoLGA or Over-the-Top VoIP applications such as Skype: Traditional mobile voice services are an integral part of the baseband radio chip and in the case of Android, for example, the user interface that runs on the application processor … Continue reading Voice over IP – The Move Away from the Baseband
Here's an interesting thought I had the other day I'd like to throw at you to get some feedback. The main challenge faced by LTE is that the current GSM and UMTS voice infrastructure can not be used with LTE anymore as it is an IP only network. There are a number of solutions to … Continue reading Dual-Radio with a Single SIM
This post is a quick follow up to a previous post on LTE smartphones at CES. In the post I came to the conclusion that unlike for CDMA operators, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for GSM/UMTS operators to go for LTE smartphones until they have a solid voice over LTE implementation. By solid, … Continue reading A List of Network Operators Ready for Voicer over LTE with VoLGA