The company said within a month it has expanded 4G LTE service footprint to 24 districts, including Bengaluru, Mysuru, Madikeri, Karwar, Chikmagalur, Belgavi and Chitradurga, covering 20 per cent of the state's population.
With rapid expansion, Idea will launch 4G service in Mangaluru, Udupi-Manipal, Vijayapura, Ballari and 18 more towns by end of the fiscal, taking the total tally to 61.
Idea has over 8.6 million consumers in Karnataka, the company said in a release here.
In December, Idea had announced the launch of 4G LTE services in all four telecom circles (five states) of South India -- Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and Karnataka.
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Ambrish Jain, Deputy Managing Director Idea Cellular said since last week of December, Idea has rapidly rolled out high- speed 4G LTE network to cover seven major markets in the country.
Idea reported had 44 million data customers as of March
31, 2016. Of these over 680,000 customers were using 4G services and 22.9 million 3G data customers.
Idea in a statement said that primary reasons that impacted mobile industry growth in financial year 2016 were reduction of interconnection charges by telecom regulator TRAI, reduction in upper cap for national roaming and SMS charges, slower uptake for mobile broadband services against supply of 3G and 4G launches across country.
During the reported fiscal, the company integrated highest ever 48,878 mobile sites (14,466 sites for 2G Sites, 19,769 for 3G sites and 14,643 for 4G) reaching a total of 191,536 sites. It also expanded its optical fibre coverage by doubling its annual roll out to 22,100 kilometre compared to 11,400 km in FY'15) reaching to 115,500 km.