Mobile operators have been expanding their customer base for a few years now, providing connectivity for an ever-growing variety of services and applications. Internet of Things, Augmented/Virtual Reality, smart factories, communication between vehicles – all of these create new business opportunities. However, in this new connected world, the transportation of voice calls remains the basic service, and supporting it is still the main use case for most mobile operators.
The strong, worldwide drive to deploy 5G networks in order to efficiently support all the new applications and verticals is coupled with a big interest on how to support the telephony service in the 5G ecosystem. Recognising that interest, we have developed a 2-day course, Voice in 5G. This course summarises the standardisation R15 and R16 work done by 3GPP for the telephony service and its interoperability with earlier generations of 3GPP systems.
The Voice in 5G course also presents telephony-specific definitions for the UE and the 5G network for the Standalone (SA) 5G deployment for the device behaviour, transport rules in the 5G System, and the IMS control of the service access. The 5G deployments are a mix of E-UTRA (LTE), WiFi and New Radio (NR) accesses, with different choices for the Core Network design (combinations of the 4G Evolved Packet Core and the 5G Core) resulting in a need for tight interworking between 4G and 5G. This course will therefore also present the rules for UE idle mode mobility, service establishment, service continuity and session transfers in a mixed environment as defined by 3GPP and GSMA.
Please note that significant parts of this course cover IMS-related topics. For those who are interested in only system-level interworking procedures, we recommend our 1-day, 4G and 5G Interworking course.