Airtel contracts Ericsson for VoLTE upgrade

India’s Bharti Airtel has contracted Ericsson to expand its voice over LTE (VoLTE)services to cater to growing demand.

Under the agreement, Airtel will deploy Ericsson’s Cloud VoLTE solution, which is used to deliver HD voice enabled VoLTE services onto a customer data center.

Ericsson Cloud VoLTE includes a virtual IMS and supporting nodes to add VoLTE services onto existing LTE data networks.

The upgrade forms part of Bharti Airtel’s network transformation program, Project Leap, and is aimed at helping Airtel carve out a larger share of the growing Indian VoLTE market. Ericsson’s latest Mobility Report predicts that there will be 780 million VoLTE subscriptions in India by 2023.

“We remain committed to building a state-of-the-art future-ready network as part of…Project Leap, and delivering best-in-class digital experiences to our smartphone customers,” Bharti Airtel CTO Randeep Sekhon commented.

“This partnership with Ericsson will allow us to rapidly increase VoLTE capacity to serve our growing traffic, and make our network prepared to easily introduce new communication services today and in 5G.”