For the smooth introduction and delivery of voice and SMS services on Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks all across the world, prominent telecom companies like AT&T, Orange, Telefonica, TeliaSonera, Verizon, Vodafone, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson have jointly developed a technical profile.
The technical profile better known as the One Voice initiative describes a set of existing 3GPP-specified functionalities that all industry stakeholders, including the network vendors, service providers and handset manufacturers, can exploit to present compatible LTE voice solutions.
By means of the open collaborative discussions, it has been derived that IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) based solution would be appropriate to live up to the consumers expectations, while moving from the current circuit switched telephony services to IP-based LTE services. IMS has the ability to concurrently offer services to broadband wireline and LTE wireless networks, leading to service convergence.
With the jointly defined technical profile, international roaming and interoperability for LTE voice and SMS services for the subscribers will be made possible, along with offering service providers a well-defined path to LTE. This initiative aims to avoid fragmentation of technical solutions and enable network operators to quickly develop their customized LTE ecosystem in association with network equipment vendors and device manufacturers. This plan will offer both broadband access and telephony services over LTE, thus laying strong foundations for future businesses.
The profile for the initial solution has been confirmed and is now available through the fore-mentioned companies.