Telefónica’s German subsidiary and Ericsson have announced plans to bring live VoLTE services to the European market. The mobile operator claims to be fully prepared for a commercial launch on its network.

Telefónica Germany has the largest mobile subscriber base in the country, and has recently completed the necessary upgrade of its network in order to host commercial VoLTE services. The service will be available to all LTE-enabled areas in Germany, and to all LTE customers.

It is also claimed that Ericsson’s IMS solution will allow Telefónica customers to utilise the HD voice service simultaneously alongside other multimedia services, including video calling and conferencing, whether they are on Telefónica’s mobile or fixed network.

The infrastructure is architected in a multi-vendor, interoperable environment, and Telefónica’s Head of Converged Solutions, Karsten Schröder, sees it as a way forward for the industry.

“When we started six years ago with the investment into IMS to deliver DSL voice services, we laid the seed for a strategic modernisation of our core service architecture,” he said. “With the advent of VoLTE, we were able to harvest the fruits by re-using the very same IMS core for our mobile customers, being the first operator proving that VoLTE is not just a standard, but can be used in a real-life multi-vendor environment. As a result, the convergent architecture allows us today to deliver seamless services agnostic to the physical access by which the customer is connected to our network.”

The service is due to go live once Telefónica is in a position to conclude the handset ecosystem capable of utilising VoLTE, and Ericsson believes enabling VoLTE over the IMS will accelerate the delivery of increased multimedia services for users.

“Based on our IMS solution Telefónica is now able to provide a modern communications experience for their users on the latest LTE smartphones,” said Anders Lindblad, Ericsson’s Head of Business Unit for Cloud and IP. “In the future they will also be able to cost-efficiently launch video communication and other new multimedia services on any accesses and any devices over their converged network.”

Movements towards VoLTE services has been on the up recently, as both Du and EE have announced their intentions to trial and launch the HD calling feature in the months ahead. The move towards VoLTE could be considered a much needed service for operators, with traditional voice telephony revenues continuing to decline.