China Mobile Ltd — the world’s biggest telecom operator by subscribers — aims to start the commercial use of Voice over LTE services by 2014.

VoLTE is an approach to deliver voice services as data flows within LTE, or 4G, networks.

Li Yue, chief executive officer of China Mobile, said on Wednesday that VoLTE has many advantages over older voice-call technologies.

“VoLTE is more efficient in terms of using wireless network resources. The adoption of VoLTE has lower costs, but a higher capacity,” Li said at Shanghai’s Mobile Asia Expo.

In addition, the VoLTE technology supports high-definition voice and video services, he added.

China Mobile plans to start comprehensive testing of VoLTE services in the third quarter, followed by a small-scale field trial in the fourth quarter.

“The commercial launch of VoLTE is likely to happen in the fourth quarter of 2014,” Li said.

The company released a VoLTE White Paper during the Mobile Asia Expo on Wednesday.

As LTE 4G network deployments accelerate globally, many telecom operators have turned their attention to the VoLTE technology.

The United States-based Verizon Wireless has confirmed that it would deploy VoLTE services later this year or in early 2014.