Chinese equipment maker ZTE on Monday announced an agreement with Aircel for deploying the latter’s 4G broadband network based on LTE technology.
Speaking on the occasion, Xu Dejun, CEO, ZTE India, said: “ We are fully committed to plan, design, supply and deploy state-of-the-art LTE ecosystem which will help Aircel offer unprecedented experience to their customers.’’
This is the second 4G contract for ZTE in India after it bagged a deal from Airtel.
“With this alliance, we have strongly established ourselves as the partner of choice for the telecom operators in the country; to develop and maintain their LTE ecosystem and also contributed to our long-term vision of developing sustainable LTE in India. 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,” Dejun said.
In the first stage, the LTE deployment will be initiated in Chennai, Rest of Tamil Nadu (RoTN) and few other business critical circles.
This announcement comes at a time when ZTE completes the migration of Aircel’s data services to ZTE’s 4G LTE evolved packet core for Chennai and RoTN circles.
ZTE has enjoyed a long-term relationship with Aircel since 2008 supporting its 2G-3G rollout in three circles of the north zone and is also the key vendor for Aircel in Next Generation Networks (NGN) for pan-India.
The fulfilment of the evolved packet core deployment in the south zones further cements the long-term partnership between the two companies. ZTE has enabled Aircel with high capacity and capability solutions with access agnostic functions for 2G, 3G and 4G LTE services.
Anupam Vasudev, CMO, Aircel added: “We believe that data is the growth engine of the future and a cutting-edge technology such as 4G LTE has the ability to empower consumers like never before. 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.’’