Reliance Jio getting ready for next battle for Wi-Fi calling

It seems that Reliance JioInfocomm is appearing to be stealing the march over its rivals Bharti Airtel and Vodafone on voice over WiFi. The telco has informed that the government will be launching the service very soon. This move will be given the Mukesh Ambani-owned carrier’s customers and the ability to make the calls which will be even in the areas which are having poor mobile signals.

Jio is now integrating the voice over the WiFi and its new range of 4G JioPhone feature phones. This will have helped the telco to make the rural areas, and the people who are familiar with the matter have said these things. The JioPhone has helped to cross the 200 million user base mark in less than two years, and this is after the commercial September 2016. India has got about 500 million feature phone users in its banks.

This new service will be helping the mobile user to initiate the internet call which will be used to the nearest public Wi-Fi network. This will route it to the destination mobile or any landline network. As a result, this will help in overcoming the frustration of the dropped calls especially in the rural areas, and they come with the buildings along with thick walls, metro stations, underground garages and many other locations where the mobile signals seem to be weak. As per a senior official of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) said that the security testing of Jio’s service had been completed now.

Jio has now asked the ministry to compete for the other tests which are required before it offered the service commercially to the customers and said that the people know the matter, as he said.

The government of India is now trying to give the push to the public WiFi ecosystem in the country under the project named as “Public Open WiFi” project which aims to broaden the spread of such services which will be offering the cheap internet connectivity in the rural areas and tier-2 and three towns. DoT plans to launch about 10,000 WiFi hotspots across the country which is next month, and it scales up to 100,000 in the first three. As per the Analysis Mason study, the public WiFi will be connecting to about 40 million new users in India by the end of 2019.

The company had initially offered the service for only Jio-Jiocalls, and after that, it expands it to the other networks as said by the people who are familiar with the matter. This telco is said to be unlikely to be the charge customers for the new service in which the customers will get lifetime free of charge on the regular Voice over LTE(VoLTE)networks.