Voice over LTE (or VoLTE), much like Voice Over IP (or VoIP) is a new standard for mobile devices (like your cell phone) that will drive the cost of voice calls down to near zero. To understand the technology, you need to understand that LTE is a data only network. From 1980’s until 2015, if you have a cell phone, you are definitely connecting on a VOICE network. As we all know today, DATA is an add-on.
The audio from someone talking into a phone can easily be converted into digital data (a whole pile of zero’s and one’s that computers understand) and then sent through a data only network… like LTE. This means that you are NOT using a voice network on your cell phone any more, you are only using your data plan (or WiFi if you are connected to your office or home WiFi network).
This is all possible because our data network speeds have increased so much. See the WHAT IS LTE and LTE-A section at the bottom of this post.
Two notable problems with VoLTE are:
For more information of VoLTE, you will likely find THIS article useful.
The internet is also a data only network; it cannot carry voice signals. If that is true, you may ask, how does Skype, Vonage, and other companies send your voice over the internet. The short answer is, they don’t send your voice; they convert your voice to digital data and send that through the internet to the person you are ‘talking’ to. You may then ask, what if you are calling to a land line; that is not connected to the internet so how does that work. This is easier than you might think. Skype and similar companies simply have a giant bank of phone lines in each major city (or country if it is small enough) and when you try to call a land line, your voice gets encoded, shipped through the internet to the recipients region (city or country) then a computer picks up a local land line and automatically calls the local number. This eliminates the high cost of “long distance”.
The instructions below are for a Samsung Android cell, but similar instructions will likely apply to all cell phones.
If you are having problems with your inbound cell calls going directly to voicemail, you will find THIS article useful.
In case you are wondering, LTE stands for Long Term Evolution and that is exactly pretty much sums up why nearly all cellular providers have gone to it. It is the standard for 2015 but has newer, faster versions that will be coming for many years to come. In fact, LTE is really a 2012-2014 standard. In 2015, LTE-A or LTE-Advanced is the standard. The Samsung S5, S6 and even the lowly iPhone 6 support LTE-A and most carriers (like Bell and Verizon) now provide LTE-A capable towers across most of their network. Below is a simplified summary of the speeds you can expect from the common networks today. Remember that “G” = Generation, so 3G, just means it is the third notable generation of data networks.
For more information on LTE, you will likely find THIS article useful.
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I want to create a self help mp3 with my voice and adding aspirations over music I have in my Itunes library. Will your software allow me to do this?
Hi Andrew;
I am sorry but I don't know what software you are referring to. I see that you have a URL link which we normally delete but I will leave this one in case someone can use it.