Vodafone Germany has began rolling out Voice over LTE and held a demonstration of 5G technology at CeBIT 2015.
The technology is available across Vodafone Germany’s LTE network, which covers more than 70 percent of the country. Vodafone said the technology is more efficient, taking up less space on a base station, lowering cooling requirements and making the hardware up to 30 more energy efficient.
Vodafone added that by rolling out the technology, it will reduce the need for smartphones to switch over to 2G and 3G networks to make voice calls, lowering the strain on battery life. It said it will add new VoLTE compatible phones to its existing range of devices from Samsung, Sony and HTC.
The rollout of the technology follows a network modernisation project carried out last year to improve voice and data quality in its 2G and 3G networks. The project is 60 percent complete.
Vodafone UK is also planning to introduce VoLTE to its customers this summer.
Meanwhile, the operator is demonstrating speeds of more than 10GBps at this week’s CeBIT event. The operator set up a 5G lab in Dresden last year where more than 500 engineers explore the use cases of the technology.
It said that when it goes live by 2020, users will be able to hit speeds of up to 1GBps and experience latencies of one millisecond. By 2030, it said speeds will be around 1,000 times faster than LTE. Vodafone Germany said potential use cases would be robotics and autonomous cars.
Jens Schulte-Bockum, CEO of Vodafone Germany, said: “5G will spearhead the digital transformation of our industrial landscape and society. The new real-time internet will make autonomous driving, remote surgery and genuine virtual classrooms possible. At CeBIT we will be demonstrating to public how Germany leads the field in pioneering 5G mobile communications research.”
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