Rel Comm plans to offer VoLTE by year-end

New Delhi: Reliance Communications is planning to offer voice calling over LTE (VoLTE) by the end of the year, giving users another option to make voice calls, and is holding talks with major network providers to finalise a player within a fortnight.

People aware of the developments said that RCom, that has inked spectrum trading and sharing agreements with Reliance Jio Infocomm, is in talks with Swedish network major Ericsson, Finnish network provider Nokia, besides Chinese competitors Huawei and ZTE, for executing the contract. "A network provider will be finalized within two weeks, the contract is likely to be given out within a quarter," a source said.

Consumers on RCom's network that have VoLTE supporting phones will be able to make use of this service, when it goes live. When contacted, RCOM declined to comment. Deal talks comes close on the heels of India's top telecom operators Bharti AirtelBSE -2.62 % and Vodafone awarding IP multimedia system solutions deployment contract for VoLTE to Nokia.

Third largest carrier Idea Cellular was also reported to be in "active talks" with the company to stitch a similar deal. The trio are preparing to take on Reliance Jio, which is expected to start operations soon and base its services on this technology. Jio had last year given a contract worth $100 million (about Rs 670 crore) to Nokia for pan-India VoLTE deployment.

VoLTE allows an operator to offer both voice and data without swit-ching between bands, with voice being just another application that rides on an LTE data network, a technology that Jio has adopted. For Jio, VoLTE will be base engine for delivering voice service since it has limited 2G and no 3G fallback network of its own.

It is banking on tie-ups with RCom if it needs backup voice airwaves. Jio and RCom have a spectrum sharing and trading agreement for 17 circles. RCom has airwaves in the efficient 850 Mhz band in all circles, besides liberalised spectrum in 2100 Mhz in 13 circles, on which it can offer VoLTE services. Jio can offer VoLTE on 2300 Mhz band, considered less efficient than 850 Mhz, which it has across all circles.

Reliance Communications (RCOM)