Airtel VoLTE service is the new trending topic in the country because the company has scheduled an event later today, where they might announce the network upgradations and possibly the VoLTE service as well. However, ahead of the launch, Apple India support page reveals that Airtel already supports VoLTE in the country.
In recent times, several TelecomTalk readers have urged that they have received an Airtel carrier update on their iPhones, which adds the support for VoLTE. However, Airtel did not reveal anything in public and even I didn't receive any carrier update for my iPhone SE. Recently, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 also picked up an update, which added the support for Airtel VoLTE. All these suggest that Airtel VoLTE service launch seems to be imminent.
There are numerous other reports claiming the same, and hopefully, the much-awaited service could go official in today's event. At the moment, Airtel is offering the voice calls to its 4G subscribers through Circuit Switched Fall Back (CSFB) technology, which can transfer subscribers to the GSM platform to make and receive calls while at the same time retaining the experience of ultra-high speed 4G services.
However, the deployment of VoLTE technology will allow Airtel to offer far superior voice quality at lower tariff to their subscribers. Reliance Jio is the only operator in India offering VoLTE services currently. Furthermore, Airtel was also said to be testing the service internally with some 4G handsets, and the results were positive.
This is the perfect time for Bharti Airtel to announce the VoLTE service because it will allow the telecom operator to go head-on-head to the Reliance Jio and other over-the-top (OTT) players like WhatsApp, Skype, Viber, and Facebook Messenger, who is offering free voice calls via data. Moreover, the free voice calls service is denting the revenues of top Indian telcos. Besides Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India also said to move to VoLTE technology in the near future, but there's no development regarding this due to the merger with Idea Cellular.
