India’s much hyped 4G connectivity holds great potential to deliver the power of fast paced information access in the hands of a large set of population of the country – Airtel is the only perator with Pan India availability of 4G today. Vodafone and Reliance Jio are likely to launch their 4G services by December 2015.
At a time when consumers are looking forward to getting converged voice, video and data on to their next generation device ecosystem of smartphones and tablets, operators are finding it hard to manage better monetization of data while embracing the next generation networks.
As a result, even though as a country 4G entered India in the year 2010, telecom operators are still not fully ready to offer 4G to their customers in India and we have partial deployments only from Airtel and Aircel while on the other hand, many operators including Vodafone, Idea, Uninor and Reliance Jio waiting to offer 4G to their customers in the near future.
4G in India – where are the services available?
Ironically, the year 2015 is the last year for all telecom operators which have won Broadband Wireless Access spectrum to roll out services in at least 90 percent of the service areas.
The Government of India auctioned 4G spectrum airwaves in the year 2010 and it was Bharti Airtel which took the lead in rolling out 4G services in Kolkata first in the year 2012, it was followed by the 4G launch in Bengaluru, Pune and Chandigarh. Today, it is the biggest 4G services provider in India.
What 4G LTE can do?
4G, is the fourth generation of mobile telecommunications technology standard, succeeding 3G and preceding 5G. A 4G system, in addition to the usual voice and other services of 3G, provides mobile broadband Internet access.
It is important to note that as part of its initial development, two 4G technology candidate systems were commercially deployed: the Mobile WiMAX standard, and the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard. Out of these two, LTE has surely won hearts and conviction of a number of global operators as well as in India and hence it is now regarded as almost a ‘de facto’ standard to embrace 4G technology.
LTE provides a big boost to the overall upload and download speeds for users and give a fillip to the telecom ecosystem as with this kind of speed, application developers can have more options for creating better user experiences on smartphones for gaming, banking, socializing, shopping, watching videos and more via the Web or mobile Apps.
4G LTE mobile networks can bring faster speeds of Internet surfing on your smartphones, tablets. Powered by 4G services such as streaming of music, video, video conferencing, faster downloads and faster sharing of high resolution pictures can give a whole new meaning to connectivity.
Also when 4G networks are rolled out in all the circles of India, all the voice and data traffic will be on IP which will mean that more and richer information can be shared with respect to users so for instance with the help of right applications or popularly known as ‘Apps’ users will be able to find the location of their favorite restaurants, or nearest hospitals, relevant clinics in a matter of milliseconds.
4G LTE can have positive implications in segments such as healthcare in the form of enabling tele-medicine, education in the form of driving ahead e-education, revolutionizing banking in the form of enabling m-banking and of course it can also power up the e-governance segment for better governance and most importantly driving transparency in processes.
What Operators are Offering on 4G today?
Airtel is one of the first few operators that are delivering 4G services for their customers in India, Aircel is second operator which has its 4G offering for customers in select circles. Vodafone has also announced its 4G plans for India. Airtel is offering 4G services in almost 300 locations of the country.
Aircel 4G Services
Aircel, one of India’s mobile services providers has launched its 4G services across four circles in Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar and Odisha.
Aircel holds 20MHz of spectrum in the 4G LTE 2300 MHz band across eight circles – Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Bihar, Odisha, Assam and North East and Jammu and Kashmir.
Reliance Jio, India’s Greenfield 4G Operator
Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd (“RJIL”) has just announced that it has successfully acquired the right to use 4G spectrum in 13 key circles across India in the recently concluded spectrum auctions conducted by DoT, Government of India.
As part of its grand plan, RJIL plans to provide seamless 4G services using LTE in 800MHz, 1800MHz and 2300MHz bands through an integrated ecosystem. Even though, it has a pan India BWA license, it has not yet launched its much awaited 4G services in India.
As of today only Airtel offers 4G services in India in a comprehensive manner. But this space is set to get hot as Reliance Jio is likely to launch its services in a few months time frame. And taking a cue from this scenario, a lot of global (names such as Nokia Lumia, Lenovo, Samsung, Huawei, OPPO, Gionee), as well as home grown Indian smartphone makers (Micromax, Karbonn etc) are now busy devising strategies for introducing their 4G LTE smartphones in the market.
According to market estimates, there are about 20 companies offering close to 50 handsets which can support 4G standards today and what’s more is the fact that smartphone device price points are also coming down and hence, it is far easier to own a 4G smartphone today than ever before. A number of 4G smartphones are now available below INR 10,000, including the Nokia Lumia 638 (Rs 6,799), LG F70 (Rs 8,900), YU Yureka (Rs 8,999), Xiaomi Redmi Note (Rs 9,999) and Huawei Honor 4X (Rs10,499).
Salient Highlights about the India LTE (4G) Devices Market
•A cumulative total of close to 20 brands have shipped LTE devices into the India market.
•Of the total LTE Smartphones shipped in India during 4Q CY 2014, 15% were exclusively sold online through retail e-commerce portals such as flipkart.com or amazon.in
•In their first month of shipping 4G Smartphones, Xiaomi and OnePlus garnered impressive market shares of 24% and 12%, respectively during December 2014. As a result, Xiaomi and OnePlus were able to make it to the ‘Top 5’ of the India LTE Smartphone brands in terms of unit shipments, during their first month of operations.