Going Out Untested and Unequipped? Think Twice!

Voice over LTE (VoLTE) is the talk of the town. Everyone in the industry is rushing to deliver VoLTE and the rich communication services that will tag along. However, many seem to profoundly underestimate the complexity underlying this new technology. VoLTE is not an upgrade of a previous technology–it’s a whole new game when compared to the good ol’ copper wires.

VoLTE is complex to say the least and presents deployment challenges that are all too often overseen lately–with costly consequences.

The long and non-exhaustive list of potential technology challenges include the following:

• Service availability requires registration and authentication is required to use IMS services
• Dropped calls especially during SRVCC, inter radio technology handovers, roaming and interconnect cases
• Latency that may increase due to signaling complexity and added load in IP security and home subscriber server
• Transport impairments including packet loss, jitter, IP route and class of service (CoS) management and traffic prioritizing problems (e.g. wrong QCI)
• Voice impairments including Internet and streaming video interference, noise, transcoding and echo issues and incorrect codec selection

Furthermore, when we get in the nitty-gritty of things we find that for both media and signaling flows the following are required – dedicated bearers with appropriate priority, delay constraints and packet error/loss rates. Call procedure management introduces challenges especially in the introduction phase as circuit switched fallback (CSBF) and single radio voice call continuity (SRVCC) have to be supported.

And there’s also IMS. An IP Multimedia subsystem (IMS) core network is the backbone responsible for delivering those complex services. So you’ll also need to test the IMS network to ensure it delivers uncompromising performance.

Lab testing and simulation is only half of the testing requirements. You’ll also need to test under live network environments to be able to quickly pinpoint potential or real flaws before they become major service-impacting events.

At a time when there are more mobile devices than humans on the planet and that every customer expects the very best in terms of service delivery, outages become out of question.

Watch this video to see why thorough VoLTE testing matters and learn about our test solutions.