Voice-over-LTE should help operators fight the likes of Skype

Rating: OpenCloud seems to think VoLTE can beat OTT

With the recent news that South Korean operator, SKT,  is to launch commercial VoLTE (Voice-over-LTE) services in September 2012, this raises the question of how mobile network operators could use VoLTE to head-off the threat posed by OTT players to their voice revenues. Typical Over-The-Top (OTT) providers include the likes of Skype and the increasingly more popular Viber – which GoMobile News recently downloaded to our Nokia Lumia 800 W7 Mango smartphone. Free VoIP calls from OTT providers – while good for a consumer perspective, pose a serious threat to mobile operators’ revenue streams, particularly as voice still constitutes two thirds of their revenues in most cases. While OTT providers have capitalised on the growing demand for VoIP, operators are responding through VoLTE investment to defend voice revenues, OpenCloud believes.LTE will provide the operators with the additional bandwidth, and the economies of scale, that will reduce the delivery costs of data.

Unfortunately, at the same time, it also provides the same benefit of low cost bandwidth for OTT providers, – possibly enabling them to take an even greater share of the market.

” On its own, therefore, investment in LTE still leaves the operators at risk of becoming bit-pipes,* warns Jonathan Bell, vp for product marketing with OpenCloud’s Mobile Service Delivery

Bell continues, “Luckily, VoLTE will provide operators with the opportunity to establish voice and video propositions that the OTT providers simply cannot match – with the provision of voicemail, roaming and interconnect – all the services that subscribers take for granted when using mobile voice.

Bell argues that, by adopting a service layer solution that supports IMS for LTE (which can also connect back to the legacy network service layer), operators will be able to deliver Telco-grade call services quickly, simply and at low cost.

“Importantly, these services, are connected via guaranteed bandwidth connections and with seamless handover at cell boundaries, come with a QoS [Quality-of-Service] that sets them a league above the OTT alternatives,” Bell reckons.

If true then mobile operators can breathe a huge sigh of relief.

© Dollargate Publishing 2012. All rights reserved.