Vodafone has announced new upgrades to its core network that should see the telco become the first in Australia to offer voice services over LTE.
In a release Vodafone noted that it’s on track to cover 95 per cent of the Australian metropolitan population by the end of 2014, and that it would be trialling Voice Over LTE services late this year for commercial rollout in 2015. It’s all part of its network improvement drive that it’s been talking up for a while now.
The release quotes Vodafone Chief Technology Officer Benoit Hanssen as stating that “The current 4G networks primarily focus on providing faster data services. Customers have rapidly adopted 4G smartphones, which offer very fast data speeds. But no Australian network is offering voice calls on its 4G network, and our new core network will enable us to do that.”
“With our enhanced indoor 4G coverage and voice calls on the same network, our customers will feel the difference. The call audio quality will be high definition, and call connection times will be significantly shorter. In other words, there will be virtually no time lag between the customer pressing the call button and the call being connected when they are using 4G.”