Ericsson announced a new milestone in making standalone 5G voice services available. The company said it completed the industry’s first successful Voice over New Radio (VoNR) interoperability test with MediaTek.
Conducted at the Ericsson Lab in Kista in early December, the interoperability test involved the use of an end-to-end network from Ericsson and Dimensity 1000 commercial chipset from MediaTek deployed on a 3.5GHz TDD band.
With Standalone New Radio (SA NR), a 5G device does not need to rely on 4G technology to make 5G voice (VoNR) calls. Using VoNR on SA architecture, service providers will be able to offer voice services on 5G-voice-capable devices as well as enhanced mobile broadband services.
Ericsson has collaborated with MediaTek on performing interoperability tests spanning SA NR, 5G Core and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) to ensure that voice support is enabled as service providers evolve their 4G networks to 5G. The two partners have also successfully tested Evolved Packet System Fallback for situations where SA is not available.
The first commercial 5G smartphones on the market use dual-mode connectivity to make voice calls over 4G and 5G for data. The next step in the network evolution is to tap 5G to accommodate data traffic while using 4G for voice calls with EPS Fallback. The final step will involve avoiding dependence on 4G altogether, with the exclusive use of 5G (NR standalone) for both voice and data services.
