Reliance Jio has changed the landscape of the telecom industry in India. Jio continues to add more subscribers on its network. It has added 16 million subscribers in 26 days which is a huge feat. Jio continues to attract more and more customers with its unlimited voice and video calls, high-speed internet, and unlimited SMS. And that’s not all, the telecom operator is also offering unlimited access services like live TV streaming – JioTV, on-demand movie streaming service – JioMovie.
Jio has intensified the telecom competition, telecom operators like Vodafone India and Idea Cellular could also join the VoLTE race soon. Other telecom operators have started rolling out their 4G LTE services across various circles. But Reliance Jio has the edge, it is offering All-IP network that supports voice over LTE (VoLTE) for HD voice calling.
To compete with Reliance, Bharti Airtel has signed a $60 million pan-India deal to Finnish mobile maker Nokia to implement voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) calling technology. The Airtel 4G VoLTE services may be launched for subscribers before the end of this year. Earlier Airtel tested the technology in a few areas and after successful testing, it is planning to launch it on a wide scale.
VoLTE allows an operator to offer both voice and data without switching between bands. VoLTE technology is being used by Jio. And the other telecom operators are using the legacy circuit-switch technology for calling. This means when a user makes the voice call, the network falls back to 2G or 3G (analogue) cellular network.
The demand for VoLTE enabled smartphones has doubled ever since the launch of Jio. A cybermedia Research report says that an estimate of more than 14 million VoLTE-enabled smartphones were shipped to India in the September quarter.
Nokia, at one point this name was the synonym of trust. This Finnish telecoms giant Nokia has been the world’s most popular and best mobile maker for a long time until 2012. However Nokia didn’t give up, despite of losing the number one spot, it is continuously trying make its return.
Nokia has now acquired French-American rival Alcatel-Lucent, this acquisition resulted in the company’s net sales grew by nearly 94 percent to 5.89 billion euros.
Nokia was once world’s top mobile phone maker, it dominated the mobile market between 1998 and 2011. But Nokia couldn’t keep up with the pace of rapidly evolving smartphones, and was overtaken by South Korean rival Samsung.