India Gets Ready For LTE

India gets ready for LTE with its first LTE conference. “It is not why LTE, but when and how?” says Telecom Additional Secretary Subodh Kumar at India’s first conference on LTE, LTE INDIA 2010.

LTE standardised by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has emerged as the next generation wireless technology that will lead the growth of mobile broadband services later in this decade. Its adoption by service providers around the world has the potential to generate economies of scale unprecedented by any previous generation of wireless networking technology as it becomes the universal 4G mobile platform used by both GSM and CDMA service providers, the technology experts claimed today at India’s first conference on LTE, LTE INDIA 2010

“Quite a lot of spectrum for this is possibily available for this purpose ” Sh Subodh Kumar told at LTE India 2010 today. “If it is not now, certainly later” he added discussing different bands in which Fourth Generation technology could improve upon the customer richness of 3G and reduce costs for the 3G operators. “It is the leading star for the next generation when high speed Internet would become pervasive narrowing the digital divide” claimed Shashi Dharan, managing director of Bharat Exhibitions, the orgnisers of the conference.

The Fourth Generation is on offer globally by 64 telecom service providers in 31 countries, said Mr.Adrian Scrase, head of Mobile Competence Centre of the 3G Partnership Project(3GPP). Most of them are the largest in the world, like Horizon of US and China Mobile. Some 22 LTE based networks would be operational by the end of this year, he added. “Why should India be different?” was the question he proposed.

How LTE would serve the mobile telecom industry was defined at the conference. Also there should be no apprehension for the 3G operators who have offered in this country Rs 70,000 crores for the 3G spectrum. “3G is part of the Fourth Generation” that would subserve 3G also, said Abhay Savargaonkar, senior vice-president, 3G networks, Bharti Airtel. It improves richness of customer experience, reduces cost per megabit and also increases average revenue per user for the operator. For customes also it would bring down cost per bit for heavy users. It would be essential as the “on demand culture” was spreading fast. There were 1.5 billion Apple users, 100 billion You Tube customers, 245 billion Yahoo fans and 413 million Google key-ins at any moment and this was spreading fast- that gave an idea of the bandwidth that would be needed in future. LTE provided the answer.

See LteWorld article for more.