Three UK Becomes First to Launch Commercial 4G Super Voice VoLTE

Mobile operator Three UK has this week become the first national provider to switch-on a commercial Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) service, which essentially allows high quality voice calling and text messages to be sent over their normally data centric 4G network. But there’s more.

The other advantage of this new “Super Voice” service is that it will make use of the operators 800MHz radio spectrum band, which can travel further and penetrates more effectively through walls for both good indoor and outdoor coverage (i.e. it costs less to cover a wider area).

Admittedly Three UK only has a small slice of 800MHz (10MHz total or 2 x 5MHz if you prefer), which means that it won’t deliver amazing 4G data speeds, but it can still offer a nice improvement over 3G and now VoLTE is a big bonus.

At launch Three UK’s 800MHz and Super Voice coverage can already reach 53% of the UK population (this mostly reflects coverage in major cities), although they aim to cover over 65% by the end of this year and of course the roll-out will continue until their overall 4G network reaches 98% coverage in a year or so.

Bryn Jones, Three UK’s CTO, said:

“By the end of the year, one million of our customers will have access to better indoor coverage and be able to use their phones in more places than ever before. We are proud to be the first network to roll this out across the country.”

As ever there is a caveat in all this, which is that you have to use a device that actually supports VoLTE technology. At launch only a small number of devices, such as the LG G4 and Samsung Galaxy S5, seem to be ready. However others (e.g. iPhone 6) will soon follow via a software update and by the end of 2016 some 7.5 million Three UK customers should be able to use VoLTE.

The one feature now missing from Three UK’s arsenal is native Wi-Fi Calling (i.e. you don’t need a third-party app for this), which both Vodafone and EE have already touted. Elsewhere Vodafone, EE and O2 are all expected to follow suit with their own VoLTE solutions within the coming weeks and months.