Mobile telephony services major, Idea, on Tuesday announced that it will scale up 4G services to 121 cities and towns in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and expressed confidence that the 4G LTE (Long-Term Evolution) services will be available in 750 cities / towns across India by June.
The country’s third largest national operator with a subscriber base of over 170 million across eight telecom circles now including AP and TS, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh & Chattisgarh, Punjab, Haryana and Odisha was all set to add two more circles by this June, said the company’s Chief Corporate Affairs Officer Rajat Mukharji.
Outlining Idea’s 4G journey, he recalled how they had started on December 23, 2015 by covering the South and going northwards by launching the service from January 14, across Punjab, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh & Chattisgarh. So far they had covered 100 cities/towns, he said. As for AP & TS, the number stood at 37 now, he stated.
Giving an overview of the services in AP and TS, Chief Operating Officer B. Ramakrishna said that currently the number of cell sites they had was 10,342 (2G), 5,472 (3G) and 2,250 offering 4G services. All that an existing customer, regardless of whether he/she was on the prepaid or postpaid platform was to walk across to any Idea touchpoint across the two States with a 4G-enabled handset and get a free SIM to start experiencing 4G speeds.
On the company’s distribution/marketing network in the two States, Mr. Ramakrishna said they had 4,000 distributors, 1.2 lakh retailers and an over 1,000 showrooms, all adding up to an investment of about Rs. 10,000 crore. “We will have covered 21 district headquarter towns and about 20 million people, representing 24 per cent of the population in AP & TS,” he added.
As for national numbers by this June, Mr. Mukherji said that when 4G was offered in 750 cities/towns, it would mean a `coverage of 50 per cent of the telecom market across 10 circles and contribute to 60 per cent of the company’s gross revenue.
The technical specifications included 1,800 MHz spectrum band using FDD (Frequency Division Duplexing) and while they currently had VoLTE (Voice over LTE) capability, it would be offered to customers once the devices ecosystem evolved.
