Airtel CEO Gopal Vittal on VoLTE trials in 5 cities

Airtel project next
Gopal Vittal, managing director and CEO (India and South Asia) of the company, said on Monday that the telecom operator is undergoing trial for voice over LTE (VoLTE) services in five cities and the services will be launched in the later part of the year.

“We are in the midst of trials. We are already doing trials in five cities. Towards the later part of the year we should be able to launch it,” Vittal told reporters.

The VoLTE allows operator to offer both voice and data without switching between bands.

At present, Reliance Jio Infocomm is the only Indian telecom operator to offer VoLTE services across the country. Idea Cellular earlier indicated that the telecom service provider is not seeing any market potential for VoLTE in India.

Airtel has also launched ‘Project Next’, a digital program to transform mobile customer experience across all its services, with an investment of Rs 2,000 crore over the next three years.

The company will revamp all its 2,500 stores across the country. The next-gen Airtel stores have been conceptualised by the UK-based 8 Inc. The first two stores are in Gurgaon.

As part of the plan, the company introduced data rollover opportunity for customers so that their data of a particular month if unused does not go waste. A customer can store up to 200GB of data.

The company said postpaid customers can now create customised solutions for the family by adding multiple postpaid connections to their account, and enjoy savings of up to 20 percent.