Fremont, CA, November 9, 2011 – The MSF (MultiService Forum) announced today the release of the White Paper for the first ever MSF VoLTE (Voice over Long Term Evolution) Interoperability Event. Publication of the White Paper completes the event hosted by MSF and mobile operators Vodafone and China Mobile in the Vodafone Test and Innovation Centre in Dusseldorf, Germany, and the China Mobile Research Institute Laboratory in Beijing, China, and was backed by the GSMA as part of its work on VoLTE.

Over 65 network elements from 19 participating vendors were tested by 60 test engineers using 200 pages of test plans during this three-week event. The test scenarios included 89 test cases and 561 scheduled tests based on different vendor combinations.

VoLTE calls and MMTel services were successfully completed within each host site and between host sites to demonstrate network inter-connect. LTE Roaming between host sites was successfully demonstrated with Diameter Routing Agents (DRA), enabling dynamic policy control between home and visited networks. Multi-vendor testing of UE, eNodeB, SeGW, EPC, IMS/MMTEL, DRA and PCC technology was conducted at each site.

The White Paper discusses the results of the VoLTE IOT event and identifies specific interoperability issues. All issues related to standards specifications were communicated to relevant organizations. It is important to identify and understand the factors that limit interoperability with commercially available equipment, from both a vendor and operator perspective. Vendors benefit from improved commercial viability of products and operators increase awareness of any interoperability issues relevant to vendor selection and deployment strategy.

“The MSF’s event has demonstrated the growing degree of compliance with VoLTE definitions and the extent to which interoperability of implementations across the vendor community has progressed,” said Dan Warren, Senior Director of Technology at the GSMA. “Not only was the testing itself a success, but the feedback from the event can be used to improve the specification of VoLTE and make sure that the level of interoperability in future products is even better than that demonstrated at this event.”

“MSF's successful VoLTE call test, including complex LTE roaming scenarios, is an important proof point demonstrating vendor readiness to deliver voice technology solutions LTE operators require for compelling end user voice services,” noted Ken Rehbehn, Principal Analyst for Mobile Infrastructure at Yankee Group. “VoLTE is critical to the mobile industry because the technology blends mobile voice calling with the advantages offered by today's LTE radio network architecture to deliver exceptional inter-personal communications services with high performance, cost effective networks.”

The Event was sponsored by GENBAND, Huawei, ZTE, Alepo, Amdocs, Cisco and Tellabs, with participation from Acme Packet, Alcatel-Lucent, Codenomicon, D2 Technologies, EXFO, IPneo, JDSU, Metaswitch, Samsung, Stoke, Traffix Systems and VSS Monitoring. Observers included ETRI, ETSI, NCS, NTT, Verizon and Videotron.

MSF VoLTE IOT Results will be discussed at LTE North America in Dallas, November 8-9, Layer 123 LTE/EPC & Converged Mobile Summit in London, December 5 – 8, and at Mobile World Asia in Shanghai, February 21 – 23, 2012.

The MSF will be partnering with ETSI and GSMA for a second VoLTE IOT event in 2012. The MSF also intends to focus on Rich Communication Suite and EPC conformance testing during the forthcoming year.