Huawei has retained its leadership position in the worldwide Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) infrastructure market in Q2 2019.

VoLTE infrastructure revenues grew 16 percent as the Asia Pacific region took the leading role in-licenses shipped, registering 62 percent growth.

The other top VoLTE vendors are Nokia and Ericsson. Huawei, ZTE, Nokia, Ericsson, and Oracle were the top VoLTE suppliers during the first quarter. This indicates that ZTE lost its #2 position in the VoLTE market.

The report did not reveal the specific share of Huawei, Nokia and Ericsson in the worldwide VoLTE infrastructure market.

VoLTE infrastructure market revenue fell 10 percent in Q1 2019 as many service providers did not aggressively promote VoLTE.

“Several factors can keep service providers from offering VoLTE. One factor is the capital cost, another is geographic coverage. VoLTE requires good RF coverage to work properly. Therefore, service providers that offer LTE at higher frequencies need more cell sites to get the same quality voice coverage,” Dave Bolan, senior analyst at Dell’Oro Group, said.

Licenses shipped to service providers in China and India accounted for most of the 62 percent growth in the Asia Pacific region. Chinese service providers are trying to migrate their 1.2 billion LTE subscribers to VoLTE. Currently only about half is using VoLTE in China.

India is also contributing to the growth in VoLTE market. Reliance Jio had over 331 million VoLTE subscribers with a 54 percent growth rate.

The report said circuit-switched core market revenues fell 21 percent; IMS core market revenues rose 13 percent and carrier IP telephony market grew 5 percent.

Mobile operators have started making investment in VoLTE because they need to roll out 5G standalone networks. “Voice over 5G will use the IMS Core, but if 5G coverage is weak, then voice calls can only fallback to VoLTE since circuit switched fallback is not supported in 5G,” Dave Bolan said.