Bharti Airtel has selected telecom network maker Ericsson to expand its VoLTE (voice over LTE) services in India.
Airtel engineers will deploy the Ericsson Cloud VoLTE solution, an industrialized solution to deliver VoLTE services onto a customer data center. The solution enables high-definition voice (HD voice) and provides modern communication services experiences across many types of devices, over LTE, Wi-Fi, and future 5G access.

Airtel India had incurred an expenditure of Rs 20,079 crore towards Capex during the nine months ended in Dec 2018. Airtel’s main focus was on the expansion of its mobile network to boost data experience to 4G customers.

Randeep Sekhon, CTO of Bharti Airtel, said: “This partnership with Ericsson will allow us to increase VoLTE capacity to serve our growing traffic, and make our network prepared to easily introduce new communication services today and in 5G.”

India is expected to have more than 780 million VoLTE subscriptions by 2023, as per the June 2018 Ericsson Mobility Report. VoLTE technology will also be the foundation for enabling 5G voice calls on different types of 5G devices.

Airtel added 11 million 4G data customers taking the total number of 4G customers to 77.1 million at the end of the December quarter. The total MBs on the Airtel data network have increased by 190.9 percent to 3,217 billion MBs. Mobile Data usage per customer has increased 96.8 percent to 10,528 MBs during the quarter.

Airtel India has 175,300 network towers including 164,859 mobile broadband towers. The company has 371,562 mobile broadband base stations.