ZTE bags Aircel 4G network deal

ZTE will plan, design, supply and deploy entire long-term evolution (LTE) ecosystem of 4G network of Aircel

Chinese telecom equipment major ZTE today bagged a contract from Aircel to set-up the latter's 4G network. A move, which Aircel hopes, will boost its retail and enterprise network.

ZTE will plan, design, supply and deploy the entire long-term evolution (LTE) ecosystem of the 4G network of Aircel. “In the initial phase of our rollout, we aim to offer our customers some of the highest data speeds in the country – in excess of 65 Mbps,” said Xu Dejun, chief executive officer of ZTE India.

The first stage of network deployment will commence with Chennai, rest of Tamil Nadu and few others. ZTE will migrate Aircel’s data services to ZTE’s 4G LTE evolved packet core for Chennai and the rest of Tamil Nadu's circles. The Chinese vendor has also been Aircel's partner for its 2G and 3G service rollouts as well.

Aircel has 4G licences in eight circles, which it bid for and won in 2010. It had spent Rs 4,500 crore for the same. The financial details of the transaction with Aircel were not revealed. However, the operator had earlier said that it intends to spend over Rs 2,700 crore to launch its 4G services.

Anupam Vasudev, chief marketing officer of Aircel said that they always believed in the potential of 4G LTE as a technology. “The huge demand for internet enabled devices, such as smartphones and tablets among the largely young population, along with increase in consumption of data on internet and rising demand for content are some of the factors fuelling the exponential growth in data,” he said.

The country's largest telecom operator, Bharti Airtel has already launched 4G services in four markets, is the first to launch the service. Reliance Jio, Tikona and Aircel are yet to start offering their services.