LIVE FROM HUAWEI’S GLOBAL MOBILE BROADBAND FORUM 2015, HONG KONG: Huawei’s Ryan Ding warned operators to up their game when it comes to providing high-quality voice and video services or risk losing out on revenue to so-called OTT players.

“The user experience will determine income. If we provide a good experience on voice we could mitigate voice revenue decline, and if we provide good video experience we can stimulate traffic,” Ding, president of Huawei’s products and solutions division, told delegates. “We need to move from a network-centric model to being experience-centric.”

Tackling voice services first, Ding claimed that OTT voice quality from the likes of Skype and WhatsApp is exceeding “normal” operator voice quality, creating a “fierce challenge” for operators. He stated that there are 1.8 billion subscriptions to OTT voice services, twice the size of the world’s largest mobile operator.

“If we do nothing then customers will vote with their feet,” said the exec.

For Ding, the solution is Voice-over LTE (VoLTE) services. He claims it is superior in quality to HD Voice and is far more spectrally efficient than traditional 2G/3G voice services. Citing data from South Korean operator LG U+, Ding said the deployment of VoLTE increases call times by a factor of three and results in improved quality of service metrics.

As for video, something the Huawei man claims is “the new voice,” Ding cited an OpenWave Mobility study that claimed a third of subscribers expressed a strong view that video buffering is simply unacceptable, with video delivery by operators lagging behind the latest handset technology.

He talked of a new measure of video experience called U-vMOS, ranking the quality from a 5 (‘excellent’) down to a 1 (‘bad’). Huawei is promoting U-vMOS as an SDK, supported by Windows, Android, iOS and Linux.

Ding calls these voice and video efforts ‘Dual HD 4.0’. “We hope that the whole industry can work together to provide dual HD 4.0. This will become the most important competitive differentiator in the future,” he claimed.

“We believe a new experience-driven era is coming. We want to work with customers and industry partners so our customers can experience high definition voice and video anywhere.”