Nokia Looking to Introduce Low-Cost 4G LTE-enables handsets: Currently in talks with Telcos

By Prarthito

| Published: Monday, April 14, 2014, 17:11 [IST]

Nokia's Indian adventure had kicked off long before the likes of Samsung and Apple even came into being in the country. However, times have changed and so has the base support for different brands in the market. But it looks like Nokia is still bent upon on re-introducing itself as a top market contender.

According to reports, Finnish handset maker Nokia is currently in advanced talks with Indian operators with 4G licenses to adopt its LTE-ready handsets.

Nokia Looking to Introduce Low-Cost 4G LTE-enables handsets

The company is also set to introduce new low-cost smartphones when operators will be prepared with their strategies to bring forward the high speed broadband technology in India, a senior executive said.

"As the India LTE landscape has been recently clarified, we are working closely with operators on India plans," said Vipul Mehrotra, director for smart devices at Nokia's Indian, Middle East and African markets.

Mehrotra said that the Nokia Lumia 635 was compatible with FDD band 3 or the 1800 Mhz band, while addressing concerns raised by some analysts that the handset may not work on bands which could be widely meant for LTE in India.

"Nokia executives say that the company has been LTE-ready since 2012 and though a number of Lumia devices already in the market had the capacity to use LTE airwaves, the facility to do so has not been activated from the back-end," the Economic Times reports on the same.

As of now, While Bharti Airtel has already launched its 4G services in some circles, Reliance Jio is expected to launch them later in the October-December quarter of 2014.

And while Bharti Airtel is the only company in India that has introduced voice services on 4G data in Bangalore, it is yet to adopt the circuit-switch-fall-back (CSFB) technology where data runs on LTE but voice calls are carried on 3G or 2G networks.