Telecom service provider (telecoms) Bharti Airtel has selected Huawei to roll out 4G LTE in Delhi.
Delhi will become the fifth 4G LTE location for Bharti Airtel after rolling out the high end mobile Internet services in Kolkata, Bangalore, Pune and Chandigarh in the last 15 months.
Delhi is likely to get 4G by September, PTI reported on Sunday.
Chinese telecom vendor Huawei is already supplying 4G LTE equipments to Airtel for Karnataka circle. ZTE is Bharti Airtel’s vendor in Kolkata and Chandigarh, while Nokia Siemens is the 4G vendor in Pune. ( Nokia Siemens leads Indian 4G / LTE market )
4G vendors such as Samsung, Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson are yet to sign 4G deals with Airtel, India’s only operator to launch 4G in the country.
Airtel recently slashed 4G tariffs by 31 percent. The move is aimed at taking on Reliance Jio Infocomm, which invested Rs 12,847 crore for 4G license.
Airtel, which last year acquired 49 percent stake in US telecom chip major Qualcomm’s Indian 4G venture Wireless Business Services (WBS), said it would increase its stake to 100 percent by end of next year.
Qualcomm invested Rs 4,912 crore to win the BWA licence in four circles such as Delhi, Mumbai, Haryana and Kerala.
After Delhi, the billionaire Sunil Mittal-promoted Bharti Airtel will launch 4G services in Mumbai and the company is in talks with players such as Huawei and ZTE for network.
Airtel is betting big on data business. Bharti Airtel’s data ARPU in the first quarter of 2013 rose 81 percent to Rs 63 from Rs 55 in the same period last fiscal.
In Q1 FY 2014, 24.4 percent of Airtel customers use data services from 20.6 percent in the corresponding quarter last year.
Data consumption rose 117 percent to reach 27.3 billion MBs in the June quarter.
Data now contributes around 7.4 percent of the total mobile revenues against 6.5 percent in Q4 2013 and 4.3 percent in the corresponding quarter last year, depicting the shift from voice to data.
