T-Mobile US Expands VoLTE and Wideband LTE Rollouts

T-Mobile has expanded its deployment of 15+15MHz Wideband LTE to 16 total markets and VoLTE to 15 total markets reaching over 100 million people.  The carrier's overall LTE footprint will exceed 230 million pops by the end this month.

Wideband LTE enables peak network download speeds up to nearly 150 Mbps.

T-Mobile was the first major provider to launch VoLTE. It now supports VoLTE on four devices, including the Samsung Galaxy S 5. In addition to expanding the number of markets served by VoLTE, the company is nearly doubling the amount of data dedicated to voice calls for highest fidelity HD Voice and faster call setup times. For HD Voice, T-Mobile US uses a 23.85 Kbps voice codec rate.  In addition, the company confirmed that it now expects to have VoLTE nationwide by the end of the year.

“The old telecoms designed their networks for a time when your phone’s only app was a phone call—and they haven’t shaken that dial-tone mind-set,” said Neville Ray, Chief Technology Officer for T-Mobile. “Our 4G LTE network was built in the last year and a half, so naturally we built it differently.  We built it for the way people use smartphones and tablets today, and we built it with a mobile Internet architecture, so we could roll out new technologies faster.”

http://newsroom.t-mobile.com/issues-insights-blog/the-un-carrier-network-designed-data-strong.htm