VoLTE and the IMTC

One of the important aspects of an open standard is the ability to rigorously test it for interoperability. And then when you’re done testing – test yet again. It is an ongoing process that never seem to end.

Take our 3G-324M AG at the IMTC – I’ve been an active participant of this group from its inception, and that was over 5 years ago. And this year, the 3G-324M AG is going to have some more testing done – it seems like there is no rest for engineers.

So now that the GSMA has decided to go full force and work on the VoLTE specification so that operators can start rolling out all-IP mobile networks and still provide the basic services they do today, there was a missing piece in the puzzle – they have the ecosystem, but not real place to use for interoperability testing amongst the vendors implementing VoLTE.

That’s exactly where the IMTC comes into the picture – the IMTC is a place where interoperability testing of multimedia specifications is done. And we’re doing it for VoLTE as well – it’s what the IMTC IMS AG is doing these days.

We have a tentative plan moving forward, that I’d like to share with you here:

• Host 4 interoperability testing events in 2010 (1 down, 3 to go), roughly one in each quarter.
• Publish the first test specification document for VoLTE by June 2010.

The test events themselves are relatively straight forward – companies volunteer to host the event and other vendors within the IMS AG gather for testing.

The test specification document is where the real effort is made – we plan to align the specification between companies by publishing a thorough test specification document which can be used by QA teams within vendor companies and by service providers before going to market with their VoLTE products.

There’s a lot of work ahead of us, but as the IMTC has done this in the past, I am sure we will be able to do it again.