Wait, VoLTE Doesn’t Work Between Carriers?

Man on smartphone
Man on smartphone

In this morning’s “Ask Pogue” video, I answered a reader’s question about the miracle of the new VoLTE cellular standard. It offers lots of great features, like vastly improved voice quality and (for Verizon and Sprint people) the ability to be on a call and online simultaneously. Check it out:

No sooner had that video gone up, though, then reader Arkady asked:

Verizon told me that VoLTE would only be possible between 2 Verizon iPhone 6 callers. In short, VoLTE Calls are only between the callers on the same provider network! I really hope that Information is INCORRECT!

So I did a little more research — research I should have done in the first place — and discovered that it’s true: VoLTE calls deliver the high-quality voice feature only between calls on the same network!

Verizon and T-Mobile both offer VoLTE nationwide. (For Verizon, it’s currently only the iPhone 6, Samsung Galaxy S5, and LG G2 phones. T-Mobile offers VoLTE on those models and several others.)

AT&T is testing VoLTE in selected areas of Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

But here’s the point: If you call a Verizon customer from your T-Mobile phone, you won’t get VoLTE features like improved voice quality and faster connecting.

It sounds like a typical, pigheaded greed grab by carriers, right? Deliberately engineering things so that you can’t call phones from other carriers?

Fortunately, that’s not the problem. In fact, it’s a technical incompatibility between network types (Verizon and Sprint use the CDMA network type; AT&T and T-Mobile use GSM) — and they’re working on fixing the problem. Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T are already conducting interoperability tests in the lab, and expect interoperability to arrive in 2015.

(And where’s Sprint? Not in those tests. According to Verizon vice president for network technology Mike Haberman, Sprint has chosen to use an incompatible standard. And so it goes.)

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