NEW DELHI: Subscribers of Bharti Airtel in Mumbai will have a better calling experience in terms of call quality and faster connection after the market leader launched its voice over LTE VoLTE ) calling services in the city, taking on bitter rival Reliance Jio at its own game.The Sunil Mittal-led market leader is the first of the established telecom carriers to adopt the technology, and now plans to rapidly expand the VoLTE calling service across all its major geographies.Analysts say through its own VoLTE services, Airtel can bring down its cost per minute besides ringfencing its subscriber base amid a fierce price war for the market share. Mukesh Ambani-led Jio — with around 130 million users — was the first telecom operator offering VoLTE calling and has been touting that service as a key differentiator with its rivals.“With the VoLTE compatible device ecosystem beginning to mature, we believe it’s the right time to enable VoLTE calling as part of our service portfolio," Abhay Savargaonkar , director-networks at Bharti Airtel, said in a statement Monday. ET was the first to report on Airtel’s VoLTE launch plans in its edition of September 8."Over the next few months, we will rapidly accelerate the deployment of VoLTE to cover all key geographies to bring HD quality calling to our customers. We keenly look forward to our device partners enabling Airtel VoLTE on their smartphones," Savargaonkar added.Airtel plans to expand its VoLTE services across India well before March 2018 end. Analysts say the addressable market has become much larger following a decline in VoLTE smartphone prices in India, thereby the move to launch the VoLTE service makes sense for Airtel.VoLTE, which offers voice in a data format, is gaining in importance, they said, as it can be delivered at a lower cost per minute than traditional voice. About one in every three phones sold in the April-June quarter in India was a VoLTE device, and this share could double by the end of the second quarter of 2018, Counterpoint Research said.According to the firm, close to 200 million 4G VoLTE featurephones could be sold in India in the next five years, providing a major opportunity for carriers to offer their services and handset makers to bring in new customers."With bundling becoming the main pricing strategy, and voice being often bundled as a part of the data package, it is imperative that operators have voice offering, which is cheaper to provision than normal circuit switch voice," said Rohan Dhamija, partner and head for India and South Asia at Analysys Mason."Given that VoLTE has a lower cost per minute than traditional voice, in a scenario where the industry is under tremendous pricing pressure, in due course the importance of VoLTE could increase,” he added.