Vodafone India will be rolling out VoLTE services from January 2018 in a phased manner. The company will start the rollout process in metro cities (Mumbai, Gujarat, Delhi, Karnataka, Kolkata) and will extend the coverage to pan-India. Vodafone did not mention any timeframe on when it's going to offer pan-India VoLTE services. If Vodafone launches VoLTE services as promised, it will become the third operator in India to offer voice calls over VoLTE technology after Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel. Vodafone's VoLTE service allows the Vodafone SuperNet 4G customers to experience HD quality calls with faster call connect time.
Vodafone 4G customers will experience VoLTE at no additional charges. All they need is a handset supporting Vodafone VoLTE and a 4G SIM. It seems like Vodafone will also follow Airtel's way of adding VoLTE support to devices manually. Currently, Vodafone India is offering voice calls through standard legacy circuit-switch technology. Shifting to Voice over LTE technology will allow the operator to go head-on-head with Reliance Jio and Airtel. And the country' second largest telecom operator may soon offer voice calls without FUP.
Bharti Airtel is currently offering VoLTE services in some major cities of India such as Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Karnataka, etc. On the flip side, we have Reliance Jio which is offering VoLTE services across the entire country.
Vodafone, in a press statement sent out today also said that it had built a data strong network of over 1,40,000 sites to enable better call quality and mobile internet experience to its customers. Even when there's a switch from 4G to 3G during a VoLTE call, the voice call may not be dropped, just like how Airtel's VoLTE. That said, Idea Cellular would be the only top telecom operator not to offer VoLTE service. Idea is also rumoured to start VoLTE service in early 2018.
