The year 2016 was in many ways the year of VoLTE and VoWifi. IP-based communication became an established standard and mobile operators are getting confident with the new technology. GSMA has just published the numbers for 2016.
IP deployments in 2016
One thing is the official announcement that an operator offers VoLTE/VoWifi, the other thing how much compliant it is and what services are really supported. We can see a big progress here as well. More and more operators are trying to interwork over IP, provide IP-based emergency services, IP voice and video mail, enhanced voice quality such as HD or EVS, support real multi-device feature or self-provisioning.
Operators are also trying to offer web-based access using WebRTC, which seems to be a must for enterprise integration and communication in context. RCS was not that popular in 2016, operators mostly use IPSMGW to provide SMS over IP. But seems it starts to change as can’t rely on SMS forever.
If the 2016 was about calling over IP, the 2017 can be about M2M (again). In the last 12 months we have seen many Sigfox and LoRaWAN deployments, and finally we got the log-awaited ‘so-called’ specification NB-IoT and we could see its first deployment. I planned to write a post about LPWANs, but then I read and article written by Nick Hunn, which is much better than anything I could put together: nb-iot is dead long live nb-iot.
Although we made a big step forward it doesn’t make our life any easier. In 2017 we can expect Artificial Intelligence everywhere, but I doubt it will allow us to relax either 🙂 Happy new year everyone!
Real Time Communication 