Airtel ties up with Ericsson to offer HD quality calling on 4G smartphones

Airtel will deploy the Ericsson Cloud VoLTE solution to deliver VoLTE services onto a customer data centre.

Bharti Airtel on Wednesday announced it has selected Swedish telecommunications manufacturer Ericsson to expand its pan-India voice over LTE (VoLTE) services to offer HD-quality calling over 4G smartphones and smart watches.

Airtel will deploy the Ericsson Cloud VoLTE solution to deliver VoLTE services onto a customer data centre.

"We remain committed to building a future-ready network as part of our network transformation programme 'Project Leap' and deliver best-in-class digital experience to our smartphone customers," said Randeep Sekhon, CTO, Bharti Airtel.

As part of "Project Leap", Airtel is offering innovative communication services.

The Ericsson Cloud VoLTE solution enables high-definition voice (HD voice) and provides modern communication service experiences across many types of devices, over LTE, Wi-Fi, and future 5G access.

According to the latest "Ericsson Mobility Report", India is expected to have more than 780 million VoLTE subscriptions by 2023.

VoLTE technology will also be the foundation for enabling 5G voice calls on different types of 5G devices.

"We are delighted to support Airtel by delivering our Ericsson Cloud VoLTE solution. We start today with expanding HD voice over LTE services across India, which will establish a platform to easily introduce new innovative services in the future," informed Nunzio Mirtillo, Ericsson's Head of Market Area, South-East Asia, Oceania and India.

Ericsson Cloud VoLTE is an industrialised solution to deliver VoLTE services onto a customer data centre Cloud.

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Reliance Jio working with partners to bring affordable big screen smartphone: Report

This device would cater to large section of the mobile phone customers, who aspire to move from feature phones to smartphones.

After cannibalising the feature phone segment with ultra-affordable 4G VoLTE-enabled devices, Reliance Jio Infocomm is now working to bring an affordable smartphone with large screen size. This device would cater to a large section of mobile phone customers, who aspire to move from feature phones to smartphones, according to a news report in the Economic Times.

Speaking to the Economic Times, Sunil Dutt, head sales, channel development at Reliance Jio said that the company is trying to work with partners who can bring in large-screen phones at an affordable price for customers who are yet to make a shift to 4G smartphones. This step would enable a large section of mobile phone users to experience the right kind of connectivity and right kind of content on their devices. Although there is no timeline decided for the launch, Dutt said that the company will keep on rolling out something new in every few months.

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Since its inception, Jio has partnered with several smartphone manufacturers such as Samsung, Oppo, Vivo, Huawei, Intex, Xiaomi, etc. to provide additional data offers bundled with smartphones that helped the company scale its user base in the country. This year, in partnership with smartphone makers, the company also announced an instant cashback offer, providing instant cashback in the form of recharge vouchers to Jio customers, making phones affordable by bringing down the effective cost.

In retrospect, Jio launched the first 4G-VoLTE enabled feature phone in the country in 2016. Named JioPhone, the feature phone was touted as a feature-rich phone loaded with smartphone-like features such as music and video playback capabilities, fast internet support, access to Jio apps, etc. Through software upgrade, the phone was also enabled to support commonly used apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Though the JioPhone and JioPhone 2 offer more features than conventional 2G feature phones, their functionality remain limited and could not be compared to smartphones.

People started to experience content services with high speed mobile data connection, thanks to JioPhone. With a smartphone in the pipeline, the company aims to provide good content experience on big screen device with good connection speeds, said Dutt to the ET.

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