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Korean telco LG Uplus launches first ever 4G voice roaming service

High-speed mobes hampered by lo-speed industry

Comment More than two decades after the first digital roamed voice calls, 4G has caught up with what GSM was invented for.

You can now speak to someone using 4G when you are not in your home country. There are some limitations: you can only make a call if you are a subscriber to LG Uplus – the number-three operator in Korea – and the only place you can make a call from is Japan, where you need to be able to access the network of the number-two operator KDDI. And it only works for people with the LG Flex 2 phone.

That’s hardly a great triumph in usability. Of course, all phones can fall back to 3G or GSM – albeit not in Japan because it doesn’t have GSM – but the pride in the announcement goes to show what a complete cock-up it was to leave voice out of the 4G specification.

The patch for this omission is Voice over LTE (VoLTE), IP-based voice for 4G. Since VoLTE is a standard there have been lots of trials and plenty of calls have been made while roaming. What makes the LG Uplus launch different is that it is a commercial service, which means they have implemented billing.

This is a non-trivial task and while LG Uplus says that it will add more networks soon, there is only scope to do it with though countries which have robust VoLTE services and billing. Both EE and Vodafone have announced VoLTE will be launched on their UK networks this summer.

LG Uplus has also said that it will introduce more handsets, which will become more significant, as there are around 40 LTE frequencies and two encoding methods. So even if the networks both have VoLTE and roaming agreements, your phone might still not work. The online database Will My Phone Work? tries to solve that problem, but it’s clear that 4G has a long way to go.

Calls on VoLTE sound crisp, with a much lower latency and LG Uplus claims a much faster connect time. It seems so far that they have managed to get it down to 20 years. ®

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