Christophe Coutelle, Director of Huawei Convergent Communications Marketing, describes how mobile operators can hide the complexity of voice evolution across network generations while benchmarking OTT services and defending RCS and VoLTE.
For mobile operators, RCS and RCSe are a natural evolutionary path, enabling them to go beyond voice and provide a compelling user experience in terms of diverse features, carrier-grade services, and ease of use. Huawei is fully committed to RCS and RCSe, providing an end-to-end solution that covers network infrastructure and terminals. At the MWC 2012, Huawei demonstrated handsets with RCS native features embedded in the address book. The company also showed TV RCS, which embeds RCS functions into the set-top box so video calls can be done from home.
Coutelle thinks that if voice and RCS services are left out from operators’ LTE offerings, it will be a threat to operators’ legacy business. But things are moving in the positive direction, as operators are beginning to realize this and send our request proposals for Voice over LTE.
Christophe comments positively on the VoLTE ecosystem as standards, handsets and infrastructure vendors are all ready. What Huawei is doing additionally is to lower the impact of implementing VoLTE on the existing network. With Huawei’s integrated solutions, operators don’t have to upgrade the network; instead, they can overlay with a new architecture and put a bridge between the new architecture and the legacy network. In this case, end users can seamlessly handover to the legacy networks. Huawei is also actively putting on the table partnerships with wholesalers to address LTE roaming, a common concern for operators.
