VoLTE accounts for "well over half" of all calls on T-Mobile's network, the carrier said today, supporting more than 300 million calls a day from 27 million users on 40 models of supporting handsets.
Those figures represent an increase from the VoLTE usage figures T-Mobile reported in December. Late last year, T-Mobile said that nearly 40 percent of voice calls on its network were transmitted via VoLTE; and just a month before, the carrier said roughly 33 percent of voice traffic was routed through VoLTE.
T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray disclosed the updated VoLTE usage data today in a blog post confirming the carrier's deployment of Enhanced Voice Services (EVS), which was reported first in FierceWireless. The LG G5, which launched late last week, was the first T-Mobile handset to support EVS, and Ray confirmed that the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge recently began to support the technology through a software update.
The operator hopes to offer seven EVS-capable devices by the end of the year.
A next-generation technology at the heart of Full HD Voice, EVS uses complex speech compression algorithms and is designed to provide higher-quality audio than AMR-WB, the previous mobile HD voice codec. EVS improves voice call reliability where signal strength is lacking, Ray wrote, resulting in fewer dropped calls, and works on both Wi-Fi and T-Mobile's LTE network.
Additionally, T-Mobile said its patent-pending deployment doesn't require both users to have supporting devices -- a user with a compatible phone can access EVS even if the person on the other end doesn't have an EVS-capable phone.
"EVS is a true next-gen voice technology that delivers some incredibly cool benefits to our customers," Ray wrote, "and I'd bet that we're the first in the nation, if not the world, to deploy it."
For more:
- see Neville Ray's blog post
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