In a move to counter Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel will be launching their 4G VoLTE services in Mumbai. Airtel will roll out this service by next week to become the second company in India to offer 4G VoLTE.
Planned to roll out in a phased manner, Airtel’s 4G VoLTE service will be first available for Mumbai, then Kolkata, and from there to other cities across the country. After Reliance Jio starting the trend of 4g VoLTE, Airtel is on road from switching their circuit-switch technology with 4G VoLTE.
What is 4G VoLTE
4G is the fourth-generation of mobile technology that enables you to browse the web, make voice and video calls and so forth. 2G services were the first to enable digital phone calls, and 3G speeds allowed us to make video calls.
VoLTE stands for Voice over LTE (Long Term Evaluation) network. This means you can make voice calls using your phone’s internet instead of the traditional technology. Reliance Jio is one example of 4G VoLTE technology usage.
Call quality over 4G networks is really good and we have a good proportion of people using 4G handsets already. According to Counterpoint Research, One out of every four smartphones sold in India in June quarter was VoLTE compatible. So in this scenario, Airtel is looking at expanding their user base via VoLTE technology.
It’ll be interesting to see how Reliance Jio and the other telecom operator’s react to Airtel’s shift to 4G VoLTE. We may soon see similar announcements from other operators like Vodafone, Idea and state-run BSNL.
