Azerbaijan to abandon GSM to move to VoLTE
By Amina Nazarli
Azerbaijan is set to abandon the GSM, a digital mobile telecommunications network that is widely used in Europe and other parts of the world, said Iltimas Mammadov, Azerbaijan’s Deputy Minister of Communications and High Technologies .
“The country will abandon the traditional GSM-technology in the next two years. Operators around the world refuse to use the traditional mobile system,” the deputy minister said.
GSM digitizes and compresses data, then sends it down a channel with two other streams of user data, each on its own time slot. It operates on either the 850 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, or 1900 MHz frequency bands.
GSM is a second-generation (2G) standard, employing Time-Division Multiple-Access spectrum-sharing, issued by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute. The GSM standard does not include 3G or 4G network capabilities.
Mammadov stressed that 3G/4G technologies are developing rapidly and today, it is possible both to talk on a smartphone use the Internet at the same time.
“Currently, the 3G network has a great audience in the country’s regions, while 4G is only in Baku and some neighboring areas. We aim to extend this technology especially in remote mountainous areas and provide the country’s whole territory with Internet and communications services,” he said.
In lieu of the GSM system, Azerbaijan is slated to provide voice service system based on the LTE (VoLTE) network soon, Mammadov said.
The Voice over LTE, first introduced by SingTel company in 2014 in Singapore (initially available only on the Galaxy Note 3) was devised as a result of operators seeking a standardized system for transferring traffic for voice over LTE.
VoLTE has up to three times more voice and data capacity than 3G UMTS and up to six times more than 2G GSM.
Voice over LTE allows users to not only use frequencies economically, but also to improve the quality of communication since the phone would no longer need to switch between networks. This would also serve to reduce the power consumption of smartphones. The benefits of VoLTE are an instant connection, high voice quality, and the ability to exchange multimedia messages and files without having to install additional applications.
Early this year VoLTE services were demonstrated in Barcelona. “It is quite possible that with deployment of VoLTE worldwide, Azerbaijan will also apply to this system,” Mammadov said, adding that work is already underway in this regard.
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Amina Nazarli is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow her on
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