Telecom firm Bharti Airtel will be providing 4G services at 3G prices to its customers in Chennai, George Mathen, Airtel’s Hub CEO – Kerala and Tamil Nadu announced here.
On May 14, Airtel had launched 4G trials with a complimentary upgrade for its customers. This, the company claims, has taken off well and evoked good response from its clients.
“The pilot beta version that we introduced was sufficient for us to get a pan-Chennai experience. The 4G adoption and scale up in the last 14 days has been healthy,” Mr. Mathen said.
In a phased manner, the firm wants to extend 4G services to Coimbatore, Tiruchi, Madurai and Vellore. Airtel has a customer base of 40 lakh users in Chennai and 1.5 crore in Tamil Nadu. The operator did not want to disclose the 3G customer base in Chennai but said that nationally, its 3G customer base is about 19. 5 million as on March 31, 2015. He admitted that there were complaints of certain data blind spots in Chennai, but with 4G infrastructure, systems have been upgraded. “I did do a trial around the city and we have addressed those issues,” he said.
In April 2012, the telecom operator had launched the country’s first 4G services in Kolkata.
