Airtel is Raising Funds from Overseas, May Bid for OneWeb, Tower Co, Meger Delayed

For last few posts by me here are all regarding Jio and its fundraising. Let get back to Jio's most commendable competitor - yes, that's Airtel. The rivalry on telecom turf between Mukesh Ambani and Sunil Mittal is pretty old. And Ambani's comeback to Indian telecom was a supercharged show. But Airtel is not just sitting idle, and they are fighting back - ARPU is growing, and stock market value is increasing. But incumbents Airtel and Vodafone Idea both are now stuck by huge AGR dues as directed by Supreme Court. 

I will share all latest development in Airtel in this post. 

After Jio started its stake sale, there was market rumor that Google may invest in Vodafone Idea, while Amazon may invest in Airtel. However none came true so far. 

VoLTE: The Most Emerging Technology in LTE Domain

Globally most of the mobile service providers already on LTE or deploying LTE on their network. As far as we are concerned about Indian landscape, here the big players all are offering LTE. 

As the global trends show the universal acceptance of VoLTE (Voice over LTE) – for offering voice calls over IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) architecture based LTE networks, here in India apart from BSNL, all serious players (Airtel, Reliance Jio, Vodafone/Idea) are launching VoLTE or already launched it. Reliance Jio is completely on VoLTE, while Vodafone is offering it in ten circles, followed by Bharti Airtel in nine circles. Idea Cellular has opened the VoLTE to its employees, which is expected to go official for the users in some circles very soon, but there’s no word on the same.

Reliance Jio is completely on VoLTE, as the telco doesn’t have any legacy voice network on 2G/3G. Others telcos have the Circuit Switched Fall Back mechanism based voice on 2G/3G and data on LTE initially, later they are moving on to VoLTE.

Why is VoLTE gaining momentum in the country? The reason is simple – better spectrum efficacy, refarming of spectrums that is being used on 2G/3G networks, better services like HD voice and video calling are the main reasons.