Voice over Wi-Fi (VoWiFi) is a Wi-Fi based voice service. The VoWiFi market has the potential to transform the 4G voice business, with various devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops, and the telecom sector remains crucial for innovation and growth across various industries.
Public WiFi Hotspot to Gain Significant Market Share
A general access network lets users continue to have access to make calls without requiring a cell tower nearby. In addition to covering places with bad cell reception, the existence of public WiFi hotspots is calling for more VoWiFi. This encourages more users to use public WiFi, especially in rural areas, where the cell tower coverage is significantly worse than in urban areas.
In India, the government is aiming to put up 10 million WiFi hotspots by 2022, in order to facilitate public data offices, and it has mandated five hotspots in each of the 250,000 gram panchayats or village blocks for public utility services under the mega initiative to digitally connect the country. BSNL has been installing 25,000 WiFi hotspots under a government program, which it aims to complete by the end of the current fiscal year in 2019, which may increase the VoWiFi market.
The increase in the number of WiFi hotspots may also help the operators in freeing up their spectrums, as the users may make use of WiFi hotspots to make a call instead of using the carrier network. Thus, operators can save their capital expenditure.
Operators are likely to leverage on the availability of WiFi to use VoWiFi to extend coverage, particularly indoors and in areas of poor cellular coverage, to reduce churn, which may enhance the market growth in the future.
