 "RJIL awards 50k-70k sites contract to Samsung: Credit Suisse")
RJIL, the telecom arm of Mukesh Ambani owned Reliance Industries (RIL), had earlier awarded a contract for 60,000 LTE base stations to Samsung.
"In addition to the original base station contract (for 60,000 LTE units for the initial launch network), we understand the second contract for 50,000-70,000 base stations has also been awarded to Samsung," Credit Suisse said in India Telecoms Sector report.
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The firm added that as many of these sites will also run on 1800 MHz FDD LTE (expected to be the base voice network), the network would be quite comparable to other operators' network in terms of reach.
When asked to comment on the report, RJIL did not respond.
The brokerage firm said it believes RJIL will launch services by March 2015. "We believe that the accelerated pace of deployments now makes us still comfortable with a March 2015 launch timeline for full-fledged voice+data services."
Credit Suisse said RJio has completed installation of 32,000 LTE base stations nationwide.
"The pace of rollout, importantly, has picked up sharply to 6,500-7,000 per month (vs 3,000 per month in May-2014). It seems the company and the rollout partners are maturing in the rollout process," it said.
Regarding prices for LTE-enabled handsets, which are very high currently, Credit Suisse said rapid developments in the global handset ecosystem are pushing down price points fast.
The brokerage firm said its China smartphone sector analysts recently observed that LTE smartphones now start at $100.
"We believe that a $100 price point for LTE smartphones could be fairly disruptive in India for the incumbents (for whom top 30 per cent customers account for 70 per cent of revenues based on industry discussions)," the report said.
RIL had earlier announced that it would launch commercial 4G telecom service of RJio in 2015 entailing investment of Rs 70,000 crore.
RIL had said that RJio will initially cover about 5,000 towns and cities accounting for over 90 per cent of urban India, as well as over 215,000 villages in India and the target is to expand this to over 600,000 villages.