T-Mobile prides itself on being the Un-carrier and the associated customer-centric strategy that moniker embodies. Neville Ray, T-Mobile’s Chief Technology Officer, talked about the company’s next move to further enhance the customer experience in a blog posted on Wednesday on the company’s site.
Titled, “Patent-Pending: T-Mobile’s Next Network Upgrade With Enhanced Voice Services,” Ray’s blog talks about the Un-carrier™ never settling.
“If there’s a better way, we’ll find it,” the blog says. “If none exists, we’ll build it. Which is as true with the T-Mobile network as it is with our Un-carrier moves. We never stop innovating and improving the network experience. In fact, we’re pushing network technology forward so fast that the carriers – and some companies that measure network performance – are years behind. Today, I’m excited to tell you more about yet another upgrade in our customers’ network experience—Enhanced Voice Services (EVS). EVS is a true next-gen voice technology that delivers some incredibly cool benefits to our customers and I’d bet that we’re the first in the nation, if not the world, to deploy it.”
Ray goes on to describe how EVS will specifically enhance the customer experience.
“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. “Second, EVS provides even higher-fidelity calls than the HD Voice we were the very first in the US to introduce back in 2013. EVS does this with a broader audio frequency range, which translates to richer, more realistic-sounding voice audio. Third, EVS delivers all this more of the time and in more places. EVS works whether you’re on Wi-Fi or the T-Mobile LTE network. And the bonus? Our patent-pending deployment of EVS benefits T-Mobile customers with compatible phones even if the person on the other end of the line doesn’t have an EVS-capable device. That’s right, even if you call another non-HD network, you’ll benefit from the enhanced voice experience.”
The new LG G5, which launched April 1, is EVS-capable right out of the box. “And we’re working toward EVS being available on 7 T-Mobile smartphones by the end of the year,” Ray noted. “EVS is yet another example of how America’s fastest LTE network is also the most advanced. In fact, our shift to IP-powered voice and data services has led to a steady drumbeat of ground-breaking calling innovations from Wi-Fi Calling to Video Calling built right into your phone’s native dialer.”
But, Ray wrote, “It was our roll out of Voice over LTE (VoLTE) that gave us the early start on EVS. VoLTE calls already go through faster (twice as fast as other calls), and while on VoLTE, customers can enjoy wicked-fast LTE data while they’re on a call. Customers on the old carriers’ CDMA networks still can’t do that. Today, 27 million T-Mobile customers on 40 models of VoLTE-enabled phones are making over 300 million calls a day— well over half of all calls on T-Mobile’s network. And the carriers? Today, they’re just beginning to work with VoLTE. And I assure you, they’ll deploy the technology like the tired old telecoms they are.”
T-Mobile’s Un-carrier strategy is first and foremost about the customer. During 2013, the company walked away from many outdated practices and standard operating procedures long held sacred. Every innovation T-Mobile has introduced since then has been to address customer pain points.