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Delivering Carrier-Grade Voice over LTE: Advantages and Challenges from a Design and Operations Perspective

14 September 2014

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There has been an explosion in data usage in wireless networks and Operators are quickly moving from 2G/3G networks towards 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) which is expected to provide significant data capacity and latency improvements. While 2G/3G networks may have reached their limits in terms of data capacity, these networks continue to provide reliable, high quality voice services even for Operators which have already deployed LTE as part of their data network. In this paper, we examine the benefits of a complete transition from mixed 2G/3G/LTE networks to an all LTE network with the ability to provide unified voice and data services. These benefits are explored from both a network Operator and equipment vendor point of view. Carrier-grade voice over LTE is expected to be an important requirement for this transition and some initial deployments configurations are expected to have challenges in terms of coverage and capacity; in this paper we explore these challenges and ways to overcome them.