T-Mobile US may focus most of its marketing efforts on cellular data services, but the carrier is also boosting its voice efforts with the unveiling of its enhanced voice services the carrier claims provides superior call reliability, clarity and availability.
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“First, EVS improves voice call reliability in areas of weaker signal, which means the rare dropped call on LTE will happen even less frequently”, Ray says in the blog. They suggest that Enhanced Voice Services does this with a “broader audio frequency range, which translates to rocker, more realistic-sounding voice audio”. Better still, T-Mobile says the the benefits of EVS extend beyond its network – you’ll get improved quality on Wi-Fi in addition to T-Mobile’s LTE network, for example, and in calls with T-Mobile subscribers that lack an EVS-supported device.
Additionally, T-Mobile said its patent-pending deployment doesn’t require both users to have supporting devices – a user with a compatible phone can access EVS even if the person on the other end doesn’t have an EVS-capable phone.
EVS provides higher-fidelity calls than the HD Voice.
Those figures represent an increase from the VoLTE usage figures T-Mobile reported in December. T-Mobile is planning to roll out EVS on a total of seven smartphones by the end of this year. According to the nation’s third largest carrier (and the only mobile operator whose CEO isn’t afraid of mentioning SpongeBob Squarepants in a promotional video), calls go through twice as fast using VoLTE. The LG G5, which launched late last week, was the first T-Mobile handset to support EVS, and Ray confirmed that the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge recently began to support the technology through a software update. And the carriers? Today, they’re just beginning to work with VoLTE.
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Interestingly, T-Mobile’s CTO, Ray, mocked competitors by saying, “And the carriers?”
