According to a recently published report from Dell'Oro Group, a source for market information about the telecommunications, networks, and data center IT industries, Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) infrastructure market revenue declined 10 per cent year-over-year (Y/Y) in 1Q 2019. Huawei ranked no.1 for the first time this quarter.
"Many service providers are not aggressively promoting VoLTE even as LTE subscriptions continue to rise," according to Dell'Oro Group senior analyst Dave Bolan.
"Several factors can keep service providers from offering VoLTE. One factor is the capital cost, another is geographic coverage. VoLTE requires good RF coverage to work properly.
"Therefore, service providers that offer LTE at higher frequencies need more cell sites to get the same quality voice coverage," continued Bolan.
"The tipping point toward VoLTE will be 5G Standalone networks. Voice over 5G will also use the IMS Core, but if 5G coverage is weak, then voice calls can only fallback to VoLTE since a circuit switched fallback is not supported in 5G.
"Service providers are slowly beginning to recognize this and are taking the adoption of VoLTE more seriously," Bolan added.
Additional highlights from the 1Q 2019 Carrier IP Telephony quarterly report include:
- Huawei took the top spot in vendor rankings for VoLTE during the quarter followed by ZTE, Nokia, Ericsson, and Oracle.
- VoLTE in the Asia Pacific region rose to over half of the worldwide licenses.
The Dell'Oro Group Carrier IP Telephony Quarterly Report aims to offer complete and in-depth coverage of the market with tables covering manufacturers' revenue, shipments, and average selling prices for both wireline and wireless voice core markets.
The segments include soft switches, media gateways, session border controllers, voice application servers, IMS CSCF, and HSS, and legacy mobile switching centers.
Dell'Oro Group is a market research firm that specialises in strategic competitive analysis in the telecommunications, networks, and data center IT markets.
