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Some of ISPreview’s readers have informed us that mobile operator EE (BT) appears to have pushed out a new carrier update, which enables the “Voice Over 5G Standalone” network feature on Smartphones that can support it (currently we’ve only seen reports of this from Apple iPhone users).
Just to recap. Most 5G mobile networks today are still largely based on Non-Standalone (NSA) technology, which means they are partly reliant upon older and slower 4G infrastructure. But SA networks are pure end-to-end 5G platforms that can deliver ultra-low latency times, greater energy efficiency, better mobile broadband speeds (particularly uploads), network slicing, improved support for Internet of Things (IoT) devices, support for Voice over New Radio (VoNR or Vo5G) and increased reliability and security etc.
Speaking of which, EE’s 5G Standalone (mobile broadband) network has so far been rolled out across 50 major towns and cities, covering over 40% of the United Kingdom’s population. EE has previously also promised that the new network would introduce “higher quality voice calls even in congested areas“, although until now we haven’t seen any reports of Voice Over 5G Standalone (VoNR) actually being enabled.
The VoNR/Vo5G technology essentially delivers the same as Voice over LTE (VoLTE) does for existing 4G networks, which means that it enables voice calls to be made directly over a 5G network (as opposed to falling back to 4G or 2G for the voice component). Over the weekend, several of our readers (credit to Harvey for being the first) noted that their iPhone’s had received a carrier update (64.1) and could now toggle VoNR on or off (seems to be enabled by default).
The customers who have seen this update report that, when in a 5GSA area, their phones now stay on 5G SA instead of going back to the NSA platform. But at present it’s not clear how widely this update has been deployed or whether Android users have also received it (hopefully we’ll get some feedback on that today). Naturally, we queried this change directly with EE, but the operator declined to give a comment.