 "Telenor to roll out 4G in 55 cities using lean GSM tech")
Data is clearly the future and telecom operators in India are looking at ways to ride this wave even if they do not have the requisite spectrum. Telenor India, which offers 2G services in six circles in India, has refarmed 1.4 MHZ of its 2G spectrum for the deployment of data services.
They are using a technology called lean GSM to offer data services and in eight circles they are going to offer narrow band LTE. The lean GSM experiment is currently on in 30 odd cities and will formally be launched in 55 cities later this year.
The telecom operator has tested this in Varanasi and has met with success and now intends to launch it in 50-55 cities. A Telenor official, while speaking at a conference on LTE Innovation, said the company had managed to refarm 1.4 Mhz of its 2G voice spectrum for data and there was no impact on voice calls. The lean GSM solution has been developed by Huawei and it helps compress data to make efficient use of limited spectrum.
They are using a technology called lean GSM to offer data services and in eight circles they are going to offer narrow band LTE. The lean GSM experiment is currently on in 30 odd cities and will formally be launched in 55 cities later this year.
The telecom operator has tested this in Varanasi and has met with success and now intends to launch it in 50-55 cities. A Telenor official, while speaking at a conference on LTE Innovation, said the company had managed to refarm 1.4 Mhz of its 2G voice spectrum for data and there was no impact on voice calls. The lean GSM solution has been developed by Huawei and it helps compress data to make efficient use of limited spectrum.
The solution is part of Telenor's project to modernise 25,000 of its sites. Telenor has been offering data on 2G at speeds of 130 kbps and with the deployment of its lean GSM technology, the throughput has improved by 20%. Data consumption in India is expected to jump 25 times by 2020 claim experts and the larger telecom operators are all riding the 4G wave. And India is expected to have 100 million LTE subscribers by end of this year.
