The largest mobile operator in India, Bharti Airtel, last week announced that it has rolled out LTE-Advanced(LTE-A) technology in Mumbai, the financial center and India's largest city. This follows an earlier rollout, the first in the country, in Kerala.
It plans to extend the deployment of LTE-A in other geographies in the coming months.
Using the LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation technology, which is also known as 4G+ operators can combine two or more carriers into one data channel to higher bandwidth and better spectrum utilisation and efficiency. Airtel deployed the carrier aggregation technology across 2300 MHz spectrum band (TD LTE) and 1800 MHz spectrum band (FD LTE). Customers with mobile devices that support LTE-A will be able to enjoy 4G data speeds of up to 135 Mbps, the telco said.
These enhancements are part of Bharti Airtel's Project Leap that was announced early this year where the operator will invest 600 billion rupees ($8.98 billion) over three years to upgrade its network. Airtel wants to use the bulk of the investment on infrastructure to improve voice and data services in the country.
According to Ajai Puri, Director – Operations (India & South Asia), Bharti Airtel “Airtel has led the rollout of 4G services in India and with the deployment of 4G Advanced, we are taking a quantum leap in delivering a superior mobile broadband experience to our customers. With the additional network capacity, customers in Mumbai can look forward considerably improved data speeds and better coverage. We will extend the deployment of 4G Advanced in other geographies in the coming months.”
