Adoption of VoWi-Fi by Major Telcos at Rapid Speed It is crucial to note that the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has been very bullish on the VoWi-Fi technology since day one and it had also issued recommendations to the telecom operators for the same. Following this rollout, a lot of telcos introduced the VoWi-Fi service or at least started testing it. The two or three major names which have already started testing VoWi-Fi in India include Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and BSNL. As the name suggests, the Voice Over WiFi protocol allows the subscribers of the service to make calls over the WiFi instead of a cellular connection. This has many advantages as the person making calls over WiFi does not have to have a cellular network, and he can simply connect a call even while he or she is in a WiFi connection. VoWi-Fi to Help Make Calls in Areas With Poor Cellular Connectivity Given this use case, the government is especially keen on launching the service for rural areas with low cellular connectivity. But, the catch is that WhatsApp already offers something which competes directly with VoWi-Fi. The Facebook-owned messaging app already comes with a voice calling feature which allows you to call a contact over the internet, thus blowing the use case of VoWi-Fi. The issue here is that when VoWi-Fi comes to existence for the majority of subscribers, there won’t be a need for any third-party applications to make calls over the internet. Given this situation, it is entirely possible that WhatsApp’s major feature may go unused for a lot of people. On the other hand, the simplicity of using a VoWi-Fi feature right from the phone dialler might attract a lot of users wishing to make a quick internet phone call. As such, although VoWi-Fi still has few hurdles to cross before it rolls out in a full-fledged manner in India, but when it does, it might threaten WhatsApp’s pre-existing audio call feature which it introduced a few years ago. Now whether the consumer adopts radically to VoWi-Fi as it did for WhatsApp remains to be seen.
