BICS claims to have established the world’s first fully end-to-end VoLTE international call, between South Korean operator SK Telecom and Belgian operator Proximus.
The service offer subscribers in the two countries the ability to exchange high definition, low latency, next generation enhanced voice services carried over the IPX networks of BICS and SK Telink, the international carrier services division of SK Telecom.
BICS’ IPX VoLTE Hub has been fully tested on commercially available devices and live LTE networks. It offers end-to-end service provisioning, billing and reporting services, alongside the abilities to seamlessly support the 4G to 3G voice transition and interwork with legacy circuit-switched voice if a VoLTE call is attempted to a handset, which is either non-compliant, or does not have LTE coverage. In addition, BICS’ IPX VoLTE Hub enables the three critical VoLTE roaming models – Local Break with Home, Visited Based Routing and S8 Home Routing. IPX VoLTE Hub is designed to support fully enhanced IMS based services including: Video over LTE and Rich Communication Services (RCS).
Jin-Hyo Park, the senior vice president and head of the Network Technology R&D Centre at SK Telecom said: “SK Telecom prides itself on pushing the boundaries of innovation and this latest announcement further enhances our position as the service leader in the Republic of Korea. International VoLTE provides the best in class voice quality demanded by customers already enjoying the service domestically.”
Laurent Claus, the director of Services Platforms & Cloud at Proximus, added: “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.”
