A large group of carriers and equipment makers yesterday came out in support of a standard called One Voice to provide voice over the next-generation Long Term Evolution mobile networks. For those adopting the standard, LTE mobile calls would become VoIP calls. The standard is necessary to ensure you can call people on 3G networks from a 4G network and across different providers, and reduces the complexity of making that happen. 4G networks are all IP-based, while voice calls are still routed over circuit-switched networks, which could cause communication problems. Figuring out how to deliver circuit-switched calls on a packet network was going to result in compromises and costs I detailed back in April.

So enter AT&T, Orange, Telefonica, TeliaSonera, Verizon, Vodafone, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nokia, Samsung Electronics, and Sony Ericsson, which are all stepping behind the One Voice effort that will use a standard version of the IMS framework to route voice calls between the IP and circuit-switched networks. It’s easy to understand w