[cliff]

Your're probably right, but maybe it doesn't matter? Voice traffic is a diminishing percentage of overall cellular traffic. LTE optimizes for the increasing majority of traffic - data.

There are extra advantages to LTE -- for example, T-Mobile is using it to make it so that you can seamlessly handover phone calls between cell towers and wifi access points (using IMS, not VoLTE). Previously this was only possible via complex technology embedded in the phone's baseband (UMA).

More calls routed over wifi means less cell utilization.