Airtel ties up with Ericsson to for VoLTE expansion

NEW DELHI: Telecom technology major Ericsson on Wednesday showcased use cases of 5G and Internet of Things (IoT) here, including Ericsson Spectrum Sharing, Intelligent Managed Services and Communication on Smart Devices. The Swedish company also showcased other technologies such as the concept "radio access network" products called Radio Stripes, to new Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) based ready solutions. "Ericsson now has 18 publicly announced 5G deals with customer names globally and we have already shipped 3 million 5G hardware ready radios till now," said Nitin Bansal, Head of Ericsson India and Head of Network Solutions, South East Asia, Oceania and India. In another development, Bharti Airtel on Wednesday announced that it has selected Ericsson to expand its pan-India voice over LTE (VoLTE) services to offer HD-quality calling over 4G smartphones and smart watches. Airtel will deploy the Ericsson Cloud VoLTE solution to deliver VoLTE services onto a customer data centre. This agreement will result in deployment of 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. "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," Randeep Sekhon, CTO, Bharti Airtel, told the reporters here. As per the June 2018 Ericsson Mobility Report, India is expected to have more than 780 million VoLTE subscriptions by 2023. VoLTE technology will also be the foundation for enabling 5G voice calls on different types of 5G devices. "We are delighted to support Airtel by delivering our Ericsson Cloud VoLTE solution, which will provide them with a high-quality, modern, cloud-based solution for today’s and tomorrow’s communication service’s needs. We start today with expanding HD voice over LTE services across India, which will establish a platform to easily introduce new innovative services in the future," Nunzio Mirtillo, Head of Market Area South East Asia, Oceania and India, Ericsson, said. Ericsson Cloud VoLTE is an industrialized solution to deliver VoLTE services onto a customer datacenter cloud. The solution includes a complete virtual IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and supporting nodes to add VoLTE service to an existing LTE data network, and serves as a foundation to evolve and expand voice and other communication services. It includes pre-integrated and validated design, a trained central delivery team, and delivery assets to ensure a fast, accurate, and optimized solution delivery.