Bittium conducts first Band 14 VoLTE call

Finland’s Bittium says it has conducted the first ever voice over LTE (VoLTE) call on the Public Safety Band 14 LTE Network.

While VoLTE has been used in commercial LTE networks for voice services, the company said this was the first time that a VoLTE call was completed on the network environment that will be used on the dedicated public safety broadband network by FirstNet in the USA.

This is an important milestone, as FirstNet will be a greenfield deployment of an LTE-only network, with no legacy circuit switched voice services, which has traditionally been used for voice calls.

In an LTE-only network, the voice communications are handled via VoLTE.

The call was made at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) campus in Boulder, Colorado.

Bittium has a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with NIST and is one of the industry partners in the NIST Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) Division’s testbed designed to evaluate advanced broadband equipment and software for emergency first responders.

“The successful VoLTE call in the FirstNet network environment represents a significant technology milestone and is proving the technical maturity of the system,” said Bittium’s Jani Lyrintzis, general manager, business development and sales in the US.

“It also demonstrates the capabilities and interoperability of our Bittium Tough Mobile smartphone to different kind of network environments.

“We are very pleased to have been able to work closely with the NIST and, with the test network environment in their campus, to achieve the VoLTE call.”

Image courtesy FirstNet.