Earlier this week, Reliance introduced its ultra-affordable 4G VoLTE-enabled feature phone, named as ‘JioPhone’ for the Indian markets and promises to link the digital divide all across the country once and for all. And now, following ‘an eye for an eye’ approach, Airtel is coming with new bundled offers for 4G feature phones soon. Reliance Jio’s 4G Feature Phone, which was launched with a Rs.0 price tag by Mukesh Ambani a few days ago, has taken the entire mobile market by storm and now, the biggest rival telecom of Reliance, Bharti Airtel is gearing up to counter attack Jio’s 4G Feature Phone tend with bundled offers.
As confirmed by Airtel MD and CEO Gopal Vittal, Airtel plans to introduce value-added combo packs for 4G feature phones shortly, for defending the increasing demand of Jio 4G Feature Phones. While confirming the report about Airtel’s new plan, Gopal Vittal said, for launching new bundled offers into the market, Airtel will have to join resources with feature phone manufacturers. Being the largest operator of India, Airtel is not interested in manufacturing 4G phones and maintaining a catalog of feature phones.
As an alternative, the New Delhi-headquartered telecom operator plans to make affiliation with 4G feature phone manufacturers to provide bundled schemes for the handsets. Airtel has already been offering bundled offers for some particular smartphones, which means, the new strategy of the company is only an extension of the existing one.
Alongside this, Airtel has also confirmed that it has plans roll out its pan-India 4G VoLTE services by the end of March 2018. Current Jio is the only VoLTE network provider in India, and if everything goes accordingly, Airtel will become the second telecom operator to provide voice call over the 4G network.
