Revenues for the cloud-native IMS VoLTE core will achieve more than 60 percent growth in 2019, according to Dell’Oro Group.
Nokia, the second largest telecom equipment maker, has remained the number one vendor in the IMS VoLTE core market in Q3 2018.

Huawei, Ericsson, and ZTE are the other leading technology vendors in the IMS VoLTE core market.

VoLTE in the Asia Pacific region rose to nearly half of the worldwide licenses. Main 4G mobile operators in Asia Pacific include China Mobile, Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio, SingTel, Telstra, among others.

“Moving to the cloud with cloud-native software is now a material part of the IMS VoLTE core revenue as service providers prepare their networks for 5G,” said David Bolan, senior analyst at Dell’Oro Group.

Operators will be using the same IMS VoLTE core in 5G for a resilient network that can improve customer experience.

Dell’Oro Group earlier said VoLTE revenue declined 9 percent quarter on quarter in Q2 2018. The report said VoLTE market in 2018 is expected to be slightly below 2017, but will return to growth in 2019. Nokia, Huawei, and Ericsson accounted for over 70 percent of the VoLTE market in Q2.

Recent VoLTE deals

Nokia is assisting China Unicom for upgrading part of its VoLTE network.

T-Mobile will use Ericsson, the third largest telecom network maker in the global telecom market, as one of their VoLTE suppliers.

Telefonica Deutschland selected Mavenir for a VoLTE upgrade.

“These are multi-year modernization contracts transitioning to cloud-native virtual network functions in order to support more cost-efficient network operations, enabling faster scaling of capacity as well as faster deployment of new services in LTE and 5G,” Dell’Oro Group said in its latest report.

More than 140 mobile operators have launched VoLTE services as of Q2 2018, said a report by SNS Telecom & IT.

VoLTE subscriptions will account for more than $280 billion in annual service revenue by 2021. VoLTE service revenue will grow at a CAGR of approximately 30 percent between 2018 and 2021. 16 percent plus of the revenue will be driven by voice based IoT applications, video calling and supplementary services.

The VoLTE infrastructure vendor market has seen several prominent M&A deals such as the merger of Sonus Networks and GENBAND to form Ribbon Communications, Cisco’s acquisition of BroadSoft, and Metaswitch Networks’ acquisition of OpenCloud.

Baburajan K