Airtel on Wednesday said it would deploy new 4G technologies in Mumbai that will deliver speed of up to 135mbps to the existing Airtel 4G users. The launch of newer 4G technologies comes in the wake of impending rollout of Jio 4G from Reliance. Jio 4G is expected to be faster than the 4G services provided by telecom operators like Vodafone and the Airtel.

"Airtel launched its 4G services in Mumbai in May 2015 on the 2300 Mhz band using the TD LTE standard and recently added capacity on the 1800 Mhz band using FD LTE. With today's rollout, Mumbai is among the few cities globally to have high speed data services over 4G Advanced," said an Airtel spokesperson.

Airtel said that it would be able to deliver the high-speed 4G using carrier aggregation technology. "Under the carrier aggregation deployment, the capacities of TD LTE (2300 MHz spectrum band) and FD LTE (1800 MHz spectrum band) have been combined to enable better spectrum utilisation and efficiency. In February 2016, Airtel deployed India's first carrier aggregation in Kerala and the network achieved 4G data speeds of up to 135 Mbps on commercially available mobile devices," said the company spokesperson.

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Although limited to Mumbai for now, the technology will be rolled out to other areas soon. "We will extend the deployment of 4G Advanced in other geographies in the coming months," said Ajai Puri, director - Operations (India & South Asia), Bharti Airtel.

Airtel said the deployment is a part of Airtel's ongoing network transformation programme called Project Leap, under which Airtel plans to invest Rs 60,000 crores over the next three years.

For the company, the Project Leap comes at a very significant time, at a time when it is facing a very aggressive challenger in the form of Jio, a service that Reliance Industries Limited is hoping to roll out very soon. Although, Airtel continues to be the number one telecom company in India, in the last few years it has been slow to respond to the concerns of consumers even as more and more Airtel users have complained of poor 4G and 3G connectivity and call drops.

The prices of data have also remained high with all major telecom operators including Airtel, Vodafone and Idea offering similar rates. However, with Jio testing its network using a preview offer -- it now has at least couple of million users -- the existing telecom operators have moved to prepare response. In the last several weeks almost all telecom operators have reduced the data prices and have come out with bundles that are more wholesome and affordability, although the reliability of the service and the speed has remained a concern.



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