The global VoLTE (Voice over LTE (News - Alert)) market should see explosive growth over the next few years, with the number of connections growing to 900 million, a CAGR of over 140 percent. That’s the word from global research company TechNavio, which believes the technology is too compelling for both providers and users to increase in popularity at only a linear rate.
And TechNavio is not the only firm to predict a seemingly exponential growth in VoLTE. Infonetics (News - Alert) expects the number of VoLTE subscriptions to increase 17-fold from its 2013 level of eight million to 138 million in 2017. About 90 percent of the VoLTE subscribers were based in South Korea, where mobile technology is usually more advanced than in the U.S.
ABI Research (News - Alert) predicts that the number of VoLTE subscribers will grow from 59.6 million this year to 1.2 billion in 2019. While the numbers between these research firms differ enough that they might not define subscribers and connections the same way, they all predict rapid growth in VoLTE.
Reason? The technology is too beneficial to pass up. Everything you do on a mobile phone becomes data packets. This means you can speak on your phone and browse the Web at the same time. It’s less of a battery drain and the voice quality is superb.
Older generation phones used cellular packets for voice and data packets for everything else. They cannot handle cell and data packets simultaneously and eat up battery power faster.
No matter which experts you talk to, they all seem to agree that VoLTE is set for rapid growth. The technology has such great benefits it’s hard to believe otherwise, but there is more to these numbers than just growth or dominance of a market.
Any time a market grows this fast with no end in sight it doesn’t just dominate the market, it becomes the market. Once more towers are built, more phones have VoLTE and more can afford it, that opens the door to widespread standardization, where even the lower-end users have very powerful mobile devices.