Reliance Jio's entry in India clearly changed the face of the long-stagnant telecom industry, and the subsequent competition among telcos is speeding development.
In another revolutionary change in the industry, Airtel on Monday announced its rollout of Voice over LTE or VoLTE in the country.
India's largest telecom operator with over 260 million subscribers is finally levelling the playing field with Reliance Jio by taking this step.Airtel 4G VoLTE should significantly improve the quality of voice calls using mobile data.
So far, only Reliance Jio had offered a VoLTE network in the country. Now, with Airtel's participation, other telcos might follow suit soon.
Airtel has just started rolling out VoLTE in the country: It is available for customers in Mumbai. However, it will soon expand to other circles, possibly starting with Kolkata, as reported earlier.
"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," Abhay Savargaonkar, Director – Networks, Bharti Airtel said in a press statement.
Jio vs Airtel
Jio vs Airtel in India is as interesting as Samsung vs Apple. While Reliance Jio has been winning over consumers with its unparalleled offers on 4G data and free VoLTE calls, Airtel has been betting on the quality of its network combined with reasonable offers.
With the rollout of VoLTE, Airtel continues to focus on quality.
Reliance Jio relies entirely on its 4G VoLTE network, which caused immense trouble in its early days. Call connectivity over VoLTE wasn't as strong as it is today, and the telco had to overcome these obstacles. Now, the Jio network for voice calls has improved a lot.
But Airtel isn't going to repeat the same mistake as Jio. Due to its existing 3G/2G network, Airtel will rely on the Circuit Switched Fall Back (CSFB) technology in case the VoLTE network isn't available.
All calls will be made on VoLTE automatically, and fall back to the older circuit when necessary to ensure consistent connections all the time.
In addition, Airtel has also deployed 4G Advanced Carrier Aggregation technology in Mumbai that offers data speeds of up to 135 Mbps by combining spectrum capacities in 2300MHz (TDD LTE) and 1800MHz (FDD LTE).
To start using Airtel's VoLTE services, users need a 4G SIM card and a 4G VoLTE-compatible smartphone. The company has assured that it will not charge anything extra for its VoLTE network, but there is no information on whether it will make calls for all of its prepaid plans free, like Reliance Jio. Stay tuned for updates.
