Proximus and SK Telecom have held the world’s first international Voice over LTE (VoLTE) call using BICS’ IP exchange (IPX) platform.
The call between Asia and Europe was carried over the IPX networks of wholesale carrier BICS and SK Telink, SK Telecom’s international carrier services unit.
The high-definition voice service was enabled by BIC’s new IPX VoLTE Hub, which provides end-to-end service provisioning and billing. According to BICS, the technology allows mobile operators to offer IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) services “ubiquitously”.
The solution also supports interworking between 4G and 3G by allowing legacy circuit-switched voice if a handset is not compliant or is outside of LTE network coverage.
Meanwhile, intelligent routing and media transcoding capabilities, which BICS said were “vital” for maintaining HD audio quality, are also supported, as are Rich Communication Services (RCS).
[Read more: BICS, Openmind launch new RCS solution]
Laurent Claus, Director of Services Platforms & Cloud at Proximus, said: “Providing exceptional quality of experience to customers is of paramount importance to us, and launching international VoLTE was the next logical step we needed to take to enhance our voice offering.
“The BICS platform enables us to offer services at the highest standards while keeping running costs and bandwidth demands low.”
Jorn Vercamert, Vice President of BICS ‘s voice business, added that VoLTE would allow operators to “reinvigorate their offering” to customers.
He said: “The launch of BICS IPX VoLTE Hub leverages our expertise and extensive experience of bringing innovative services to the market and being a one stop solution provider for these services.”