Over recent months, driven by the emergence of smart devices such as the iPhone, Blackberry Bold and Storm etc; combined with the promise of much better data speeds; myself and many of the people I know have been switching from 2/2.5G devices to their 3G  equivalents.

While data performance over 3G has undoubtedly improved, the quality and performance of voice services seems to have deteriorated in equal or greater proportion, making many people wonder if it was worth making the switch.

Since I getting myself a Blackberry Storm a few of months ago, I have experienced a much higher incidence of dropped calls and garbled connections, and the people that I know tell me that they have the same experiences with many other 3G devices that are out there.  As a consequence, many of them are so frustrated that they are debating whether to go out and buy a 2G phone as wel - to make sure that they  can talk to people when they want to!

Until recently I assumed that poor voice quality on 3G was driven by the 3G network having poorer coverage than the underlying 2G one, because it was not fully built out yet and that this spotty coverage was resulting in dropped calls - Not so.

Because then I  noticed that calls keep dropping even when I was sitting at my desk, with  great signal strength and data performance to match - So what’s going on and why is voice quality over state-of-the-art 3G tecnology so much poorer than using what is now considered ‘legacy’ 2G infrastructure? 

Digging deeper it is clear that unpredictable data demand on 3G can have a significant impact on voice - So when data usage is high, power gets dedicted to data, voice power and quality deteriorates and calls get dropped - In other words voice services, which are still the main reason for most people having a mobile device, are no longer guaranteed and effectively only function on a best effort basis as data demand changes!

Such performance is unacceptable and not sustainable for end-users and Operators must move quickly to overcome the problem. Otherwise,as data demand escalates, driven by the proliferation of new applications, voice quality is only going to get worse - With associated potential for increased customer disatisfaction, higher churn and lower revenues!

Fortunately for the Operators the team at Cerion has been looking at this challenge for quite a while and has developed methods for characterizing and reacting to variances in data demand as it emerges. Including sophisticated techniques for optimizing the design and configuration of the network based on real worl demand that balance the tradeoffs between  voice and data demand and which helps to reduce the impacts that dynamic data demand can have on end-user voice  quality.