Airtel has finally launched its Voice over LTE or VoLTE services in Mumbai.The company is planning to roll out VoLTE services across the country over the next few months.
Airtel customers will get HD quality voice calls along with faster call set up time, the company said. The service is available in popular 4G/LTE enabled devices and customers can call on any mobile, landline network using Airtel VoLTE. Further, there will be no additional data charges for VoLTE and calls will be billed as per existing plan or packs benefits.
In case of non-availability of 4G network coverage, VoLTE calls will automatically fall back on the 3G/2G network, so that the customers continue to stay connected. “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.
For the unintended, VoLTE stands for Voice over Long-Term Evolution and is used for transmitting voice data over the 4G/LTE network, rather than using 2G/ 3G connections. The USP of VoLTE technology is its HD voice calling quality which is much superior to normal 2G/3G voice calling and far more data can be transferred over 4G than 2G or 3G. As of now, Reliance Jio was the only operator that offered VoLTE services in India. The company is already offering free calls over the network. With this, the competition will surely intensify between Airtel and Reliance Jio and it would be interesting to see how fast Airtel will be able to cover all the circles.
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However, there are limited numbers of smartphones that support the Airtel VoLTE services. The company has listed out the smartphones on its website which include all latest Apple iPhones including iPhone SE, Samsung Galaxy J7, Galaxy J2 and Galaxy A8; Xiaomi Mi Max, Mi 5 and Redmi Note 4; Gionee A1; and Oppo F3. The company says more models will keep getting added to the list.
The company also advised its customers with Dual-SIM handsets to insert the SIM on SIM slot 1 and network mode should be set as 4G/3G/2G (Auto). Airtel has also deployed 4G Advanced Carrier Aggregation technology in Mumbai that enables data speeds of up to 135 Mbps by combining spectrum capacities in 2300 MHz (TD LTE) and 1800 Mhz (FD LTE).