When one of our younger engineers recently showed off a new tablet-based app tha t let him watch

television, I shocked him by pointing out that I (the one with t he greying hair) had wireless television access as a kid. I was, of course, talk ing about rabbit-ear antennas and NTSC signals in UHF/VHF bands. In a strange wa y, the evolution of broadcast television technology had come full circle. The same is true of telephony. For most of its history, voice was the one and on ly application. Then came WAP-equipped cellphones that could access packet data. Next came faster, better packet data which led to smartphones hosting Internetbased apps. Finally, with the deployment of LTE the killer app that drives IMS dep loyment is voice calling. What is obvious to engineers in the cases of both television and telephony is th at, despite the appearance of having come full-circle, the technologies have bec ome incredibly complex over the years. Equally obvious is that end-users don t car e what s required of engineers: in the case of voice calling, service must be at l east as good as it used to be, or the public sees it as a failure. All of this leads to the imminent deployment of Voice over LTE, or VoLTE. Since LTE is a data-only technology, most current LTE network operators handle voice v ia fallback techniques, making use of the still-existing circuit-switched networks . However, some LTE networks have already begun to offer carrier grade digitized v oice directly. Conceptually it is Voice-over-IP (VoIP) on LTE, but there is a lo t more to it than that. The fundamental difference between simple VoIP and VoLTE is that VoLTE requires a Quality-of-Service or QoS component. Typically, over-the-top VoIP applications like Skype and Google Voice rely on the Internet to deliver packets. The proble m is that Internet delivery is done on a best effort basis; all you can do is get your packets to the cloud and cross your fingers. VoLTE, on the other hand, uses the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and new radio a ccess network features to ensure low latency, improved error correction in fring e areas, and other features that guarantee voice service as good as or better th an any we ve ever experienced. If all the technology works as planned, even those of us who remember telephones with rotary dials will be amazed at the quality of the calls we ll be making in the not-too-distant future, as well as the innovativ e new services that will be bundled with VoLTE.