A Meeting of the Minds

Every good cause needs a strong adversary. And Dean Bubley has kept me on my toes the past few years with his UMA bashing. It’s nice to finally be on the same side of the fence with our support for VoLGA.

Dean wrote a lively (as expected) blog post about VoLGA to correspond with his whitepaper focusing on the pitfalls of CS Fallback as an alternative to VoLGA.

Dean first wrote about VoLGA when the VoLGA Forum launched, and he expressed his belief that the technology could work. Here’s to hoping others in the marketplace sit up and take notice.

VoLGA Webinar Redux

Did you get a chance to listen in live to the webinar the VoLGA Forum sponsored with Light Reading? If not, the replay is available now.

The topic was "Solving the Voice & SMS over LTE Problem." The focus was on understanding the issues from an operator's perspective. The concept of VoLGA, or Voice over LTE via the existing 3GPP UMA/GAN standard, is to “elevate” voice and SMS services to become packet applications over LTE. Today there is no viable mechanism to support SMS over LTE. VoLGA can be used to deliver SMS over LTE and solve this immediate issue facing service deployment.

Gabriel Brown, a senior analyst with Heavy Reading who covers the LTE landscape, introduced the topic and discussed the current landscape. The bulk of the presentation was by Franz Seiser, head of core network architecture with Deutsche Telekom (formerly T-Mobile International).

Listen to it at your leisure. Interested in more about VoLGA? Visit the VoLGA Forum site and VoiceoverLTE.com.

Why SMS is critical for LTE datacards

There’s a good post on the Voice over LTE blog about the critical need to support SMS with LTE datacards and netbooks. While we often think of SMS as a consumer service, in reality, it was originally developed as an operational control channel for the mobile network to communicate with devices in the field.

The lack of a traditional SMS channel in LTE will hamper LTE datacards and netbooks. According to the post, there are many, many operator systems which rely on SMS to provide customer care, management and provisioning messages to the datacards, and the lack of SMS support in LTE is a serious issue.

Look for VoLGA to step up and meet this need.

LTE World Summit

I’m just back from Berlin at Informa’s LTE World Summit event. There is no doubt that voice was a hot topic. Voice over LTE permeated all three days of the conference.

While IMS remains most operator’s long term voice strategy, it’s clear that a more immediate solution is required. To date a technology called CS Fallback has emerged as the primary ‘competition’ to VoLGA.

Marc Fossier, vice president for Orange/FT Group, articulated the general perception of CS Fallback, when he said in his presentation that “…2G/3G fallback is not a very nice solution, but it could be usable.” That’s a vote of confidence!

Later in the conference, Franz Seiser with T-Mobile presented VoLGA. Mr. Seiser articulated the drivers for T-Mobile to push VoLGA. T-Mobile requirements for voice over LTE include:

• Provide a good customer experience
• Use the LTE radio
  
• Build upon the existing Rel-4 CS network and investment
• “do not touch the MSC”
• Build upon fully 3GPP compliant Rel-8 EPC/LTE network
• Reuse existing CS roaming/interconnect regime
• Minimize impact on handset, especially the UI

For this, T-Mobile has ruled out CS Fallback. After this conference, I suspect other operators will as well.

VoLGA Forum Keeps its Nose to the Grindstone

The VoLGA-Forum continues its quiet preparation. Late last week on its site, the group published a draft of the Stage 2 / Architecture specifications.

This is the latest spec publication from a group comprised of leaders in the wireless industry seeking to enable mobile operators to deliver mobile voice and messaging services over LTE access networks based on the existing 3GPP GAN standard.

The group’s next step is to finalize these specs and move them from the draft category to final.

VoLGA = Operator’s response to Mobile VoIP

The ‘skype-hype’ is reaching a new level, and for good reason. By some accounts, Skype (through Skype Out or point to point) now accounts for 30% of the massive international calling market today.

And now VoIP is going mobile. Gartner just released a report suggesting that in the next 10 years, more than half of mobile voice traffic will be VoIP based, with much of that enabled through the introduction of LTE. It seems to me that launching an LTE service without voice is inviting mobile VoIP into your network.

This is why the voice over LTE ‘problem’ is so critical for mobile operators, and why more and more operators are investigating VoLGA.

VoLGA lets mobile operators leverage the voice infrastructure already in place to compete directly with Mobile VoIP. With VoLGA, mobile operators can weave their voice service into the myriad of Web 2.0 applications, leveraging the unbridled innovation of the Internet while embedding their core revenue generating service.

In addition, VoLGA lets mobile operators take their voice service beyond handsets, turning it into a VoIP object which can be downloaded to laptops, ultra-mobile PCs, mobile internet devices, or embedded into LTE home gateways.

From the beginning, the power of the UMA/GAN specification has been to extend the mobile operator’s core service to the internet. Now more than ever, mobile operators are turning to UMA/GAN to solve this problem.

Sonus has a VAN (Controller)

A few weeks back, Sonus Networks announced that it had joined the VoLGA Forum. Keen UMA Today readers recall that the VoLGA is a voice over LTE technology based on the existing 3GPP GAN standards.

Joining a forum isn't that exciting, but there was a nugget in the release that I missed. In the announcement, Sonus actually announced that it’s MobilEdge product (part of its MobilEvolution strategy) can be used as a VoLGA Access Network Controller, or VAN-Controller.

Sonus MobilEvolution architecture supports joint interworking of packet and circuit-switched network elements, enabling mobile network operators to initially combine a circuit-switched core network for legacy services with an IP-based access and core network for multimedia services. The Sonus MobilEdge can be used as a VANC (VoLGA Access Network Controller) as defined through the VoLGA forum. The VoLGA forum has been set up to facilitate the delivery of voice and SMS services within the LTE environment from initial development.

I believe this is the first confirmed product announcement supporting VoLGA. It’s good to see vendors pledging support to the technology.

VoLGA Quietly Posts Stage 1 Requirements Document

It appears that the VoLGA-Forum has quietly posted the first document in a set of VoLGA specifications. Check it out here.

It looks as though Architecture (Stage 2) and Protocol (Stage 3) documents will be forthcoming shortly.

VoLGA, which stands for Voice over LTE via Generic Access, looks to use the existing 3GPP UMA/GAN specification as the basis for resolving the problems associated with delivering voice over LTE.

UMA Jumps Into LTE

On Monday, the UMA/GAN standard moved into its next phase with the announcement that the ‘VoLGA Forum’ is basing its work on the spec . The forum states that it is “comprised of leaders in the wireless industry seeking to enable mobile operators to deliver mobile voice and messaging services over LTE access networks based on the existing 3GPP GAN standard.”

I say GAN has moved into its next phase because, as a technology, this is nothing new. GAN has been delivering ‘voice and messaging services’ (and more) over fixed-line IP access networks for some time. The forum’s announcement simply acknowledges that there is a viable mobile IP access network in the form of LTE requiring a similar service.

While the technology is similar, the actual application is quite different. Whereas traditional UMA services like dual-mode phones and femtocells address the FMC segment of the market, the concept of VoLGA is to have a VoLGA client on every LTE phone.

Basically VoLGA is the enabler for making phone calls over LTE.

Based on posts by Martin Sauter and my good buddy Dean Bubley, it’s clear there is a problem with the ‘status quo’ approach for voice over LTE. Martin Sauter’s comment:

Over the past two years I've written numerous posts about different proposed options on how to do voice calls over LTE and the lack of a simple and straight voice solution. This is, in my opinion, a serious threat to the success of LTE if not resolved soon.

I’m sure we have not heard the last of the VoLGA Forum.