Finally India figures in 4G map

Yesterday, Airtel launched 4G service in Calcutta, first time in India. When I wrote my post, "will India leapfrog to 4G?" few months back, little did I imagine that it will be so soon, although it definitely gives a sense of pleasure to see it coming in real. Airtel picked the TDD-LTE as the technology and ZTE, China as its technology partner. With Airtel already adopting it, we can expect Reliance to follow the suit some time this year. That would make LTE-TDD the technology of choice for 4G in entire south Asia with China taking the lead. It also looks like that China's dominance in 4G technology space will be complete. Why Airtel chose ZTE:

• ZTE says it is a leader in developing LTE technologies and has applied for 381 essential patents (EPs) for LTE standards, which account for approximately seven percent of the total number of EP applications globally.
• ZTE has won 30 contracts for LTE commercial application and has deployed test networks in cooperation with more than 100 operators across the globe.
• To date, ZTE has signed three contracts related to deploying and upgrading 3.5GHz TDD-LTE networks in Asia-Pacific and Africa.
• ZTE is a major global vendor driving the use of 3.5GHz and 3.6GHz bands. The use of these bands has now been approved as an industry standard by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project.
• ZTE also has helped operators like Japan's Softbank, Sweden's Hi3G and China Mobile successfully deploy TD-LTE networks.
• and ZTE is dedicated to becoming the world's No. 1 TDD-LTE brand. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), ZTE filed for the most PCT patents of any company worldwide in 2011 with 2,826 filings.

Sounds great! Since the number of 4G handsets available in India is quite low at the moment, Airtel is launching dongles (made by ZTE) with the SIM cards built in. The tariff also looks quite reasonable compared to existing ADSL+ or 3G broadband rate. Presently they have three plans:

plan name	rentals (per month-INR)	free quota (GB)	speed post FUP (kbps)
breakfree	999	6	128
breakfree max	1399	9	128
breakfree ultra	1999	18	128

Airtel says they would be starting pan-indian broadband service soon. Although theoretical limit for 4G service is 100 Mbps [download] and 40 Mbps [upload], one cannot reasonably expect that speed with Airtel at present; 128kbps for that matter is a good starting point.

What made Airtel launch the service so early? It appears that world, primarily led by Chinese technology developers, are moving for fast 4G adoption. This Financial report article said that China telecom has decided to accelerate its 4G deployment. Deployment also became more cost-effective with average cost coming down to $10K for converting a 3G Base Station to 4G Base station. China telecom has invested most of all the telecom operators on 4G trial so far. They have good reason to accelerate the 4G deployment. But it appears that many countries will be in 4G map before this year ends. Srilanka already is, for example. While European and US operators may be slow with 4G deployment GSA expects that south asia will drive the 4G deployment this year. As per their latest reports there are 300 operators invested in 4G and 347 LTE User devices launched by 63 vendors.

While Network side deployment is going on full-swing, one area that concerns the market is there are not many 4G handsets available. Handset technology is little more tricky since it involves voice, video telephony and roaming over 4G and probably 3G and standardization effort continues to be an ongoing process. However all existing handset leaders are gearing up to launch 4G-enabled smartphone sometime this year looking at both China and India as the major market segment. In fact there is already news  that Apple's iPhone 5 as well as new iPad will support LTE-TDD.

Overall, it looks like, 2012 will be a very exciting year for high-speed mobile telephony and Indian consumers are not going to be left behind.

In case anyone is interested, 4G World Asia is scheduled on 21st May in Singapore