Several industry big wigs including AT&T, Orange, Vodafone and Ericsson have voiced their support for IMS to handle voice and SMS traffic on LTE networks.
IMS is the protocol of choice by the 3GPP standards, body but proponents of alternate protocols argue that an interim technology is needed to handle voice and data over LTE before IMS is adopted.
One of these interim technologies, voice over LTE via generic access (VoLGA), has pushed the industry to adopt VoLGA as an interim measure. So far, that effort has only attracted one operator: Germany's T-Mobile.
According to Steve Shaw with Kineto Wireless, a VoLGA Forum member, today's announcement means "the path is wide open for VoLGA to be that interim solution" over competing technologies like circuit-switch fallback.