Huawei leads VoLTE market in first quarter beating Nokia

Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) infrastructure market revenue declined 10 percent in Q1 2019, according to a report from Dell’Oro Group.
LTE base station IndiaHuawei Technologies, which is facing pressure to exit from the United States and some of the European markets due to the alleged security reasons, has been ranked no.1 in the VoLTE infrastructure market — for the first time this quarter.

Huawei Technologies has become the number one vendor in Q1 2019 in the global VoLTE infrastructure market — beating Nokia. Nokia was the leading VoLTE infrastructure in 2018. The report did not reveal reasons for the success of Huawei and decline of Nokia in the worldwide VoLTE infrastructure market.

ZTE, Nokia, Ericsson and Oracle are the top vendors – in terms of revenue market share — in the global VoLTE infrastructure market. The research report released today did not reveal the market share of the top suppliers in the VoLTE infrastructure market.

Dell’Oro Group in a March 5, 2019 report said Nokia has retained its first-place ranking for the VoLTE market in 2018.

Idea Cellular on 19 June 2018 announced it completed the roll out of VoLTE service across 20 circles in India.

Ericsson in April 2019 said it won a VoLTE deal from Indian telecom operator Bharti Airtel to expand VoLTE services in India.

Ericsson’s Mobility Report says India is expected to have 780 million VoLTE subscriptions by 2023. VoLTE technology will be the foundation for enabling 5G voice calls on different types of 5G devices.

VoLTE in the Asia Pacific region rose to over half of the worldwide licenses.

“Many service providers are not aggressively promoting VoLTE even as LTE subscriptions continue to rise,” Dave Bolan, senior analyst at Dell’Oro Group, said.

The report said several factors including the capital cost and geographic coverage can keep service providers from offering VoLTE. VoLTE requires good RF coverage to work properly. Service providers that offer LTE at higher frequencies need more cell sites to get the same quality voice coverage.

The report noted that the tipping point toward VoLTE will be 5G Standalone networks. Voice over 5G will also use the IMS Core, but if 5G coverage is weak, then voice calls can fallback to VoLTE since circuit switched fallback is not supported in 5G.

Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio are in advanced stages of testing Voice over WiFi or WiFi calling services, Business Line reported. VoWiFi connects users even without a mobile signal. WiFi calling eliminates mobile blackspots for users to make and receive calls over WiFi or wireless internet connections.

Baburajan K