Optus’ mobile customers will soon be able to take advantage of the latest voice call technology on compatible handsets, with the carrier announcing today that its rollout of VoLTE (or Voice over LTE) has commenced in major capital cities.
What’s Voice over LTE? Today, when you make a voice call on most networks, your phone will drop from 4G connectivity to 3G, because until now, only data services have been available over 4G (and SMS). To make a call, your phone uses an older technology which you’d most likely notice in the form of a brief delay between hitting dial, and your phone actually dialling.
With VoLTE, that delay is gone. The principal advantage of VoLTE is that your calls will connect faster, your call quality will be higher, and you can continue to enjoy fast data speeds while on a phone call.
Optus’ Dennis Wong says that Optus has been testing the technology for a while:
“We’ve been testing and tweaking VoLTE for the best customer experience and we’re excited Optus customers will start to see the benefits of this technology on our 4G Plus network.
We’ve all been on a call when we’ve needed to quickly look up the address of a restaurant or download a file from an email. With VoLTE, this will all be a lot faster and easier because you’ll stay on a 4G connection.”
To take advantage of VoLTE, you’ll need a compatible handset; at this stage, Samsung’s Galaxy S7 range will be supported, with more devices being tested and switched over in the coming weeks and months.
Is the Nexus 6P compatible with the Vodafone VoLTE or Optus VoLTE?
It’s compatible but not provisioned
What are the other phones that support this. Will The Galaxy S6 edge plus support this
I haven’t made a personal phone call that lasted more than 15 seconds, in years. I can’t even remember the last time I made a phone call.
Will this support voice over wifi?
Down the track it might. The core technology of VoLTE is voice over IP, rather than circuit switched voice, so there’s little in the way of offering access to the same core voice call functionality over any other network connection. We’re seeing this elsewhere, so I’ve little doubt we’ll see it from Optus too.