MTS INDIA ADOPTS 1X ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY

MTS India, the CDMA mobile service of Sistema Shyam Teleservices Ltd (SSTL), today announced its plan to adopt 1X Advanced technology. With this announcement, MTS India would become the first CDMA2000 brand in the world to offer a future-ready technology that will enable best-in-class and simultaneous voice and high speed EV-DO data services.

SSTL is the fastest Indian telecom operator to reach the one million subscriber mark. The company has quickly expanded to cover 6 telecom circles and will expand further to cover another five circles by end of this year, including key business centres of Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai.

India is the second largest CDMA2000 market after the US with a subscriber

base of over 100 million.

MTS India is the only new entrant having license to operate in all 22 telecom circles across India. It currently has 1.7 million subscribers across six circles in India and has plans to complete the pan India roll-out in 2010. MTS India was recently recognized as the “Most Successful New Telecom Operator” by the Ministry of Telecommunications & IT.

1X Advanced has been standardized by Third Generation Partnership Project 2 (3GPP2) in June 2009 and is expected to be commercially deployed in 2010. 1X Advanced uses the same spectrum and bandwidth as CDMA2000 1X, and significantly improves coverage and capacity with the same resources by employing cutting edge interference cancellation techniques as well as enhanced radio configurations. These improvements include base transceiver station (BTS) interference cancellation, enhanced power control, early frame termination, and smart blanking.

Mr. Vsevolod Rozanov, president and CEO of Sistema Shyam TeleServices Limited quoted “With a need to offer uncompromising, seamless call connectivity with fewer call drops, and data services at ever faster speeds, operators are in search of solutions that utilize limited spectrum more efficiently, to be able to support a larger subscriber-base on it. 1X Advanced is designed to meet both these needs and will help MTS to significantly increase its capacity to provide outstandingly clear voice quality to its growing subscriber base.  The unprecedented voice capacity of 1X Advanced will allow MTS to efficiently support more voice demand within the same spectrum, and offer high speed EV-DO based broadband data services in times to come. With interference cancellation and radio link enhancements, it will help MTS get more voice capacity over the same spectrum in future.”