Voice and Internet Multimedia in UMTS Networks

Voice telephony is the predominant service on today's cellular mobile networks, in terms of number of customers, revenues and network usage. However, it is difficult to predict how long this will be the case given the rising demand for new Internet multimedia services. It is therefore essential that 3rd generation (3G) mobile networks support a voice telephony service, but also that these networks are also capable of providing Internet multimedia services using the same technology.This paper provides an overview of how voice telephony is provided in the initial phase of the universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS). It then describes how this is expected to evolve in later phases — so that voice telephony becomes one of a large number of multimedia services provided from a common Internet protocol-based mobile network.