Vodafone India today announced that its SuperNet 4G coverage reached across 17 circles and will be available in 2,400 towns across the country by March 2017.
Airtel 4G is available in 22 telecom circles across the country. Airtel is yet to disclose the number of towns where its 4G services are available.
By March 2017, Idea said its 4G services will be expanded to 20 circles from the current 11, covering 94 percent of its revenue market.
Reliance Jio has 4G presence across the country. Reliance Jio has 72 million 4G customers and the target is to achieve 100 million by March 2017. Airtel, Idea Cellular and Vodafone never revealed their 4G subscriber base in India.
According to the latest TRAI data available in January 2017, Reliance Jio provides faster 4G speeds as compared with Vodafone India, Idea Cellular and Bharti Airtel.
Reliance Jio, according to TRAI’s speed test portal, is offering mobile Internet download speed of 9.92 Mbps. Airtel has been ranked second in the list with 8.07 Mbps 4G speed and Vodafone came in third with a speed of 7.53 Mbps.
Vodafone achievements
Vodafone SuperNet 4G is available in Kerala, Karnataka, Kolkata, Delhi & NCR, Mumbai, Haryana, UP (east), Gujarat, West Bengal, Rajasthan, Assam, North East, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, UP (west), Odisha and Punjab.
These 17 circles cover 91 percent of Vodafone India’s total revenues and 95 percent of mobile data revenues.
“We were the quickest to roll out networks and launch Vodafone SuperNet 4G services across several parts of the country for which we won spectrum as recently as October 2016,” said Sunil Sood, MD and CEO of Vodafone India.
“The investments in creating a modern and scalable network and partnering with leading technology infrastructure service providers have enabled aggressive network rollout in terms of pace and scale of deployment,” Sunil Sood said.
Vodafone India has rolled out one 4G site every 10-minutes in the last two months. In each circle, Vodafone is growing its 4G footprint by adding new towns daily.
Currently, Idea Cellular’s wireless broadband network is spread across 17 circles with a population of over 880 million, with 50 percent of this population covered.
Idea Cellular earlier said it executed the fastest 4G roll-out in India last year — with one broadband site being installed every ten minutes. Idea Cellular has over 216,000 cell sites and a fibre network of over 1.28 lakh kms. Idea Cellular is planning to add over 57,000 sites in FY 2017, with a Capex of Rs 8,000 crore.
Vodafone will be disclosing the number of 4G cellular sites in India when it announces its third quarter result.
Baburajan K
editor@telecomlead.com
