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I wonder how efficient VoLTE will be. I love the idea that my carrier is just a dumb pipe that I use to make VoIP calls with whatever service I desire but from
by jevinskie 14y ago
I wonder how efficient VoLTE will be. I love the idea that my carrier is just a dumb pipe that I use to make VoIP calls with whatever service I desire but from what I have heard that may be a poor engineering decision. I remember a Qualcomm (its their baseband chip in the iPhone 4S and 5) engineer state that there have been decades of research into getting the highest # of calls and best call quality per Hz of OTA bandwidth. The engineer went on to say that operating at a packet level is too high of an abstraction if you want to squeeze the most out of the cell network. He stated that you must drop down into lower, more niche/optimized layers to really match the efficiency that they already have achieved on GSM/CDMA voice.
- cliff 14y agoYour're probably right, but maybe it doesn't matter? Voice traffic is a diminishing percentage of overall cellular traffic. LTE optimizes for the increasing majority of traffic - data. There are extra advantages to LTE -- for example, T-Mobile is using it to make it so that you can seamlessly handover phone calls between cell towers and wifi access points (using IMS, not VoLTE). Previously this was only possible via complex technology embedded in the phone's baseband (UMA). More calls routed over wifi means less cell utilization.
- jjtheblunt 14y agoMore details needed. (Ex Qualcomm engineer here, who finds the argument you were told tenuous. CDMA and GSM use digital vocoders, some adjust the bitrate for the characteristics of what is being encoded, but I'm just curious about the details of the argument.)
- wmf 14y agoPackets have more overhead than TDM circuits just because of headers, but LTE does contain several optimizations for VoIP like header compression.