VoLTE (voice over LTE) should see about 20 commercial deployments this year, according to the GSMA, and the slow trickle could become a flood from 2015. However, the platform faces daunting challenges, not least the need to get it right first time, in a world where Skype and Google Voice lurk, and to deploy IMS (in many cases a hammer to crack a nut), not to mention the collapse of voice revenues in general. But at its heart is the last hope for mobile carriers’ voice-based business ‘ to integrate this into a broader, richer communications service that can be firmly differentiated from the web services and can form the basis of a developer ecosystem. The challenges in its way…