Vodacom improves its VoLTE service with new audio codec

Vodacom launched VoLTE (Voice over LTE) a little over three years ago now. Today, it announced that it’s further tuning this offering.

The company is replacing the old AMR codec, with the higher bandwidth EVS codec, or Enhanced Voice Services.

While AMR has a relatively limited audio bandwidth of up to 7kHz, EVS allows for bandwidth of up to 20kHz, increasing the overall quality of the service. This, Vodacom claims, brings CD-like audio quality to its VoLTE offering.

“Vodacom is always looking to improve the experience customers have on our network,” said Siyabonga Zulu, Vodacom’s exec for radio network engineering.

“Deploying Enhanced Voice Services is another step in this process and will ensure even better voice quality for our 4G users. With our extensive 4G coverage, it makes sense to ensure that 4G users get the best possible voice quality to complement our super-fast 4G speeds.”

This announcement won’t affect those who don’t have a VoLTE enabled smartphone, but those who do use the service should experience a marked improvement to audio quality.

Feature image: Vodacom