Voice over LTE (VoLTE) is gaining momentum, with likely adoption this year in North America, Hong Kong, and Japan given increasing chipset (Qualcomm, Broadcom, ST-Ericsson) and handset (LG, Sony) availability. VoLTE is important for telcos as it can enable differentiating features such as HD voice, in-call multimedia sharing, and video calling, helping them combat the over-the-top threat. In addition, longer-term it has the potential for infrastructure savings from collapsing the voice and data networks.
NVIDIA provided detail on its claims relating to Tegra 4’s superior compute performance relative to Qualcomm and also
discussed its Tegra 4i solution (with integrated LTE baseband), targeted at handsets.
Qualcomm holds an early lead, appearing in the Vizion, ZTE, Samsung, and LG devices, though meaningful market volume will not come until 2014 once China Mobile has surpassed 200,000 base stations.
Multi-mode is a recognition that operators will launch TD-LTE as an addition to existing WCDMA and FDD-LTE networks. Most of the key smartphone brands (except for Apple) plan to launch TD-LTE handsets by mid-year.