As we had reported last week, Airtel has finally launched VoLTE services for its customers in Mumbai. The service will be immediately available to Airtel users in Mumbai and will be launched for more users in other cities in the coming weeks. The company plans to cover the PAN India region with its VoLTE services in the ongoing commercial year, i.e. before March 2018.
With this development, Airtel has become the second operator after Reliance Jio to offer VoLTE services in India. Reliance Jio started offering these services commercially in September 2016 and has been enjoying a free interrupted run in the territory. With Airtel launching VoLTE, there are speculations that other operators including Vodafone and Idea will launch VoLTE services soon too.
With VoLTE services, Airtel will now be able to offer better call quality and quick call connects. This will also help the company to address the increasing call drop issues. VoLTE is a technology which uses data packets to transfer voice signals from one device to another.
“This is a significant milestone in Airtel’s network transformation journey under Project Leap. Airtel has built a world-class 4G network across India and with the VoLTE-compatible device ecosystem beginning to mature, we believe it’s the right time to enable VoLTE calling as part of our service portfolio,” said Abhay Savargaonkar, Director – Networks, Bharti Airtel.
“Over the next few months, we will rapidly accelerate the deployment of VoLTE to cover all key geographies to bring HD quality calling to our customers. We keenly look forward to our device partners enabling Airtel VoLTE on their smartphones,” he added.
The calls made on VoLTE will need VoLTE supporting smartphones and no additional data will be required for making phone calls. The calling will continue to be charged as before.
Off late, the approach of the operators in India has shifted towards providing cheaper data packs. This has been because of a huge penetration of mobile devices and increased internet coverage across the country. The situation was even helped by Reliance Jio, which had provided months of free service post its launch and has been continuing to providing data at dirt cheap rates, on top of that, the voice call remains free forever. The ongoing bloodbath in telecom sector prompted Airtel, Vodafone and Idea to slash their pricing of data as well as voice calls and pushed them towards launching VoLTE sooner than they had planned.
Before this launch, there were speculations that Airtel might also announce the launch of their feature 4G phone, which has been making news all over the internet lately. However, there was no such indication or announcement about such launch, leaving the fans guessing and speculating for a possible Diwali launch.