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On 12/4/2022 5:31 PM, Bill Horne wrote:
As most of my readers know, I've been dissatisfied with Verizon
Mobile, and the way it has demanded that those like my wife, who had
“4G” phones which were not “4G” enough to suit their taste, buy new cell phones to enable her to keep paying exorbitant amounts of money
to Verizon Mobile so she can “enjoy” the “benefits” of something called “volte” - whatever that may be.
VoLTE is Voice over LTE. It means that your voice call is carried on the
LTE network rather than on the old CDMA network (or whatever that
carrier used to use, like GSM if it's T-Mobile).
While I am never one to defend Verizon, in this case they're right. The brilliant folks at 3GPP who invented LTE, which for the record is
/incredibly/ complex, had the weird notion that the folks over in the
TCP/IP world, who worked on that sexy Internet thingy, were somehow
brighter than them, and therefore they had to do everything in LTE using TCP/IP. Which was bad enough, since TCP/IP is a terrible kludge held
together with lots of bailing wire and Moore's Law spit.
Now in the TCP/IP world there are at least three ways to carry voice. Enterprise systems do so by running a shim layer below IP, usually MPLS,
which provides a quality-assured connection (btw that last word is a red
flag to an IP fanatic, for silly historical reasons) to the IP flow
within it. Low-tier consumer VoIP services (like Vonage) simply "send
and pray" that the "best efforts" (scare quotes required) IP delivery
mechanism of the public Internet doesn't lose so many packets that the
voice is garbled. The third way is an early 2000s idea called IMS, IP Multimedia Subsystem, which has the simplicity of a Rube Goldberg
contraption. Essentially it tries to monitor all TCP flows in order to
make sure there's room for the voice flow. (The original idea around
2002 was to be able to bill for them.) It had largely been abandoned
elsewhere when 3GPP adopted it as the way to run voice over LTE.
So come 2010 or so, LTE cells were popping up all over the place, but
VoLTE was still being worked on, since IMS is the 2000-piece jigsaw
puzzle of networking and was layered atop the 1000-piece puzzle of LTE.
Hence all "LTE" phones of that era retained their underlying carrier's
3G (or 2G) voice protocol while using LTE for data. Which on a flip
phone ain't much, but hey it was in the chipset so the phone could be
labeled LTE. And this did finally let Verizon use SIM cards, which were invented for GSM and which the GSMA had essentially banned CDMA networs
from using.
So your wife's ancient flip phone is not VoLTE but CDMA for voice, and
the CDMA network is being shut down since she is one of the last two
dozen or so people in the country regularly using it. And you need a
phone that has VoLTE, which has been running for probable over a decade
by now. This isn't any con-spee-waaah-see by Verizon, it's just routine
product evolution, like current software no longer supporting Windows XP machines or PowerPC Macs.
--
Fred R. Goldstein k1io fred "at" interisle.net
Interisle Consulting Group
+1 617 795 2701
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 12/4/2022 5:31 PM, Bill Horne wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:
[email protected]">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<p><font size="4">As most of my readers know, I've been
dissatisfied with Verizon Mobile, and the way it has demanded
that those like my wife, who had “4G” phones which were not
“4G” enough to suit their taste, buy new cell phones to enable
her to keep paying exorbitant amounts of money to Verizon
Mobile so she can “enjoy” the “benefits” of something called
“volte” - whatever that may be.</font></p>
<font size="4"></font></blockquote>
<br>
VoLTE is Voice over LTE. It means that your voice call is carried on
the LTE network rather than on the old CDMA network (or whatever
that carrier used to use, like GSM if it's T-Mobile).<br>
<br>
While I am never one to defend Verizon, in this case they're right.
The brilliant folks at 3GPP who invented LTE, which for the record
is <i>incredibly</i> complex, had the weird notion that the folks
over in the TCP/IP world, who worked on that sexy Internet thingy,
were somehow brighter than them, and therefore they had to do
everything in LTE using TCP/IP. Which was bad enough, since TCP/IP
is a terrible kludge held together with lots of bailing wire and
Moore's Law spit. <br>
<br>
Now in the TCP/IP world there are at least three ways to carry
voice. Enterprise systems do so by running a shim layer below IP,
usually MPLS, which provides a quality-assured connection (btw that
last word is a red flag to an IP fanatic, for silly historical
reasons) to the IP flow within it. Low-tier consumer VoIP services
(like Vonage) simply "send and pray" that the "best efforts" (scare
quotes required) IP delivery mechanism of the public Internet
doesn't lose so many packets that the voice is garbled. The third
way is an early 2000s idea called IMS, IP Multimedia Subsystem,
which has the simplicity of a Rube Goldberg contraption. Essentially
it tries to monitor all TCP flows in order to make sure there's room
for the voice flow. (The original idea around 2002 was to be able to
bill for them.) It had largely been abandoned elsewhere when 3GPP
adopted it as the way to run voice over LTE. <br>
<br>
So come 2010 or so, LTE cells were popping up all over the place,
but VoLTE was still being worked on, since IMS is the 2000-piece
jigsaw puzzle of networking and was layered atop the 1000-piece
puzzle of LTE. Hence all "LTE" phones of that era retained their
underlying carrier's 3G (or 2G) voice protocol while using LTE for
data. Which on a flip phone ain't much, but hey it was in the
chipset so the phone could be labeled LTE. And this did finally let
Verizon use SIM cards, which were invented for GSM and which the
GSMA had essentially banned CDMA networs from using.<br>
<br>
So your wife's ancient flip phone is not VoLTE but CDMA for voice,
and the CDMA network is being shut down since she is one of the last
two dozen or so people in the country regularly using it. And you
need a phone that has VoLTE, which has been running for probable
over a decade by now. This isn't any con-spee-waaah-see by Verizon,
it's just routine product evolution, like current software no longer
supporting Windows XP machines or PowerPC Macs. <br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Fred R. Goldstein k1io fred "at" interisle.net
Interisle Consulting Group
+1 617 795 2701</pre>
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