We are in talks with telcos regarding 4G deployment: Nitin Bansal

Telecom equipment maker - Ericsson said that smartphone user in India will grow to 11 GB per month by 2022, while the total mobile data traffic in India is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 40 percent, reaching nearly eight exabytes of data per month compared to around one exabytes of data consumption by the end of 2016.

While Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Jio has recently said that incumbents telecom players are not investing in technology, Swedish telecom equipment manufacturer Ericsson today said that they are in talks with telcos regarding 4G deployment and capacity expansion.

"Yes we are in talks with telecom players regarding 4G deployment," Nitin Bansal, head of products at Ericsson India said.

Amit Bhardwaj, Director, Head of Network Product Solutions told Gizbot that " currently we have 4G customers like Bharti Airtel, Idea and Vodafone."

"As new apps continue to emerge and usage behavior evolves, network performance will play an even bigger role in determining smartphone users' loyalty towards their operators. In fact, mobile broadband experience in India is five times more effective in driving loyalty than tariff structure and pricing," said Bansal.

"VoLTE represents a great opportunity for telecom operators in India who are looking to route voice calls over 4G LTE networks enabling lower cost per minute for voice calls as well as free up legacy spectrum bands for re-farming," he added.

GSM remained the dominant technology in 2016, accounting for over 70 percent of total mobile subscriptions. LTE and WCDMA/HSPA technologies together are expected to represent 85 percent of all Indian subscriptions by 2022 while 5G subscriptions are forecast to become available only in 2022 - representing 0.2 percent of total mobile subscriptions reaching three million.

As of 2016, there were 23 million cellular IoT connections and by 2022, this is estimated to reach 191 million. "Driving this growth is the government's 'Digital India' vision, focus on 'Smart Cities', new use cases for IoT and the launch of 5G," the findings showed.