Posts Tagged ‘4G technology’

Airtel 4G Launch March 20

Bharti AirTel, India’s largest mobile operator, is set to win the race to roll out the country’s first 4G mobile telecom network with a new service said to be launching in Kolkata on March 20.

The country’s largest private telecom company had earlier appointed Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) for building and operating its 4G network in the Maharashtra circle using TD-LTE, one of the 4G technology. However, it was not known immediately who would be the vendor for the Kolkata circle.

Sources close to the operator, which has more than 175 million subscribers, claim that CEO Sanjay Kapoor has stated that it will introduce the service in a little over a week. Initially, it is said that Airtel’s 4G service will be available in Kolkata only, before later being expanded nationwide, according to  Economic Times.

The company had won spectrum for high-speed wireless broadband service (Broadband Wireless Access spectrum) in four telecom circles namely Kolkata, Maharashtra, Punjab and Karnataka and paid Rs 3,314.36 crore in 2010.

Rival Reliance was another successful bidder, though it has been more muted on its 4G plans, which are expected to see a mid-2012 launch. The firm was said to have trialed services from Alcatel Lucent, Ericsson and Huawei last year, but it remains to be seen if Airtel’s rumored rollout will hasten Reliance’s own 4G launch.

After the launch of third- generation (3G) telecom services, India may see more advanced 4G services in the second half of next year, Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal said.

“We have large capacities in spectrum to move forward in 4G which is hopefully going to be launched towards end of next year. Later half of 2012…we should be ready to launch 4G,” Sibal said at an event.

The peak data transfer speed (internet) in 4G technology is up to 100 Megabit per second on a device moving at high speed of around 100 kilometer (high mobility) per hour and 1 Gigabit per second for low mobility.

4G Technology India

Vijayalakhsmi Gupta, member (finance), department of telecommunications (DoT) while speaking at the 6th 3G India 2010 conference, organised by Bharat Exhibitions said, “Soon after the success of 3G auctions, we have proactively started exploring 4G technology. Trai has already floated consultation papers regarding 4G. The technology is likely to make headway into India by around 2013,” she added.

She added that after 3G rollout, while video-on-demand and other live streaming services are likely to gain prominence among the high revenue generating customers, enhanced bandwidth may also lead to increased usage of existing mobile (value added services) VAS.

Currently, the VAS market is worth around Rs 12,000 crore, generating approximately 10% of wireless industry revenues. The share of VAS in wireless revenue is likely to increase to 12-13 % by 2011. This growth would be driven by increased operator focus on VAS due to continuous fall in voice tariffs, increased penetration of feature rich handsets, availability of vernacular content and increased user adoption of VAS applications.

What is 4G ?

4G refers to the fourth generation of cellular wireless standards. It is a successor to 3G and 2G  families of standards. The nomenclature of the generations generally refers to a change in the fundamental nature of the service, non-backwards compatible transmission technology and new frequency bands. The first was the move from 1981 analog (1G) to digital (2G) transmission in 1992. This was followed, in 2002, by 3G multi-media support, spread spectrum transmission and at least 200 kbit/s, soon expected to be followed by 4G, which refers to all-IP packet-switched networks, mobile ultra-broadband (gigabit speed) access and multi-carrier transmission