Vodafone India has opted for a wait-and-watch approach in launching 4G operations, with the company now focusing on 3G services.
The GSM operator is also now into IP-fication of its entire network (making it Internet Protocol-ready), and this is expected to be completed in three years. About 20-25 per cent of the work has been completed. “I think 4G has been maturing as a technology… In a couple of years, it will be the right technology for us to start deploying, but today all the data opportunities we see in the market can be served well with 3G,” Vishant Vora, Director-Technology, Vodafone India, told Business Line. “The whole ecosystem, I think, is not conducive for 4G launch and I think that’s why companies that won 4G licences have not pushed the technology much,” he said. “It would be a while before we launch 4G, as we intend to concentrate on 3G.”
As of June 30, Vodafone India had 155 million subscribers. It had 41.2 million data users and 3.7 million 3G subscribers. The company had not bid for 4G spectrum during the 2010 auctions.
Prime concerns
Lack of clarity on 4G spectrum pricing and auction, and lack of a proper 4G ecosystem were among the prime concerns.
The company, which had started IP-fication of its network six years back, is now accelerating the process. “The main benefit to the user is that the data browsing would be much faster, with reduced latencies (time delay for data transfer), increase in download speeds and less buffering (readying media files for playback),” Vora said.
Operators are gradually shifting to IP networks from the traditional time-division multiplex one — a move that will help in increasing network speeds.
“The experience could be similar to what one enjoys in the West on landline networks,” Vora said, adding Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks and Huawei among others were the vendors for the programme.