Bharti Airtel recently announced that it has made a strategic move and chosen 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 implement 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 helps 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 smartphones or 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 industrialized solution to deliver VoLTE services onto a customer data center Cloud.
As per the reports some time back Bharti Airtel and Swedish networking and telecom giant Ericsson also laid a foundation to achieve a download speed of over 500 Mbps on smartphones during a first-ever live 4G trials across the country.
The speed was achieved during a recent indoor trial of Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) technology over a live 4G long-term evolution (LTE) network in Delhi-National Capital Region.
In an outdoor environment, the peak download speed of more than 400 Mbps was achieved with coverage of about 180 metres from the base station, the companies said in a statement.
“We are pleased to partner Ericsson to conduct India’s first LAA trial which is also a big step towards 5G and Gigabit networks. LAA is an important technology evolution that can truly unlock the power of 4G LTE networks by leveraging unutilized unlicensed spectrum,” said Randeep Sekhon, CTO, Bharti Airtel.
LAA is a unique technology as telecom players developed and build their networks to achieve Gigabit LTE by opening up previously untapped resources of unlicensed spectrum, delivering speeds once thought only possible over fibre.