Vodafone India will roll out next generation 4G services across Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai over the next one month, its Chief Operating Officer, Naveen Chopra, said.
The 4G services were rolled out on Monday in Kolkata.
“These five circles (Karnataka, Kerala, Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai) account for around 50 per cent of our data revenues and hence were prioritised for our 4G launch,” Mr.Chopra said.
Till December 2015, Vodafone had invested around Rs.986 crore in network expansion in Kolkata.
The company introduced the 4G services in Kerala and Karnataka a fortnight ago.
On launching the services elsewhere, he indicated this was linked to spectrum availability. “Spectrum is a critical resource and we would acquire spectrum in other circles,” he said. Vodafone was awaiting clarity and the government notification on spectrum harmonisation. “It would be premature to talk on launching (4G services) in other circles now,” he said.
It was learnt that harmonisation made airwaves contiguous or ‘continuous’ which is critical for 4G services.
The 1800 MHz band is most popular globally for 4G LTE deployment but if such airwaves are non-contiguous, the quality of 4G services are said to suffer. Long term evolution or 'LTE' is the technology standard for delivering high-speed broadband services, known as 4G.
4G services make possible high speed downloads enhancing the experience of a video or movie download. While in 3G service, speeds range between 3-6 Mbps, for 4G it will be 10-30 Mbps. In layman’s terms, a 4G download will be five times faster than 3G.
He, however, did not reveal the investments required for rolling out such services.
To a question on call-drop, Vodafone said “it has set up a war-room to tackle the problem which is linked to the spectrum availability in a city. “It is an area of deep focus,” Mr. Chopra said. He also said it was not revenue-friendly for the company either.
West Bengal Industry, Finance and IT Minister Amit Mitra sought proposal from the company for fine-tuning governance through mobile-phones.
“We have various applications used by the departments of disaster management, health and consumer affairs among others. Ours is a GtoC SMS system and so far, 20 crore SMS have been sent,” he said. West Bengal has a teledensity of 74 per cent which makes for a user-base of around seven crore. Around a third of them use smartphones.
