South Korean electronics giant Samsung will become the first company ever to use Voice over Long Term Evolution (VoLTE) technology in its Galaxy S3. South Korea-based SK Telecom confirmed that its HD VoLTE technology will be integrated with the Samsung Galaxy S3.

The VoLTE service is anticipated to kick off either later this month or early September in South Korea. "We will continue to work to quickly roll out VoLTE enabled products globally, providing the best LTE experience for our customers across the world," said JK Shin, President of Samsung's Mobile Communications. Infonetics Research informed that VoLTE service will be available in the U.S in late 2012.

Little is known about the VoLTE technology. Samsung's Web site gives consumers an insight into this up-and-coming technology.

"VoLTE uses an IP packet-based service for both voice and data, allowing for new multimedia services to be introduced, such as being able to convert from voice call to video call. It also offers more than twice the voice frequency of 3G and HD-level audio codec (AMR-WB), providing high quality voice calls comparable to having a direct conversation with someone in person," details the site.

Currently, 4G LTE service is globally available on smartphones; moreover, the LTE speed is used for data services only. The implementation of VoLTE call quality will improve enormously, supporting HD quality wherever 4G LTE is available. However, places where 3G or even 2G telecom spectrum is used still exist.

No hardware or apps upgrade will be required for using VoLTE services; instead, a software update will be deployed to the existing Samsung Galaxy S3 users. New Galaxy S3 devices will have the HD VoLTE integrated into them straight out of the box.

The implementation of VoLTE takes the telecommunication industry nearer to a major milestone. Whether this implementation presents further opportunities to the smartphone and tablet manufacturers remains to be seen.