Though there is no definite date of launch is announced or rumored, there are lots of happenings inside Infotel Broadband, the 4G arm of Reliance Industries. It is expected that Infotel will kickstart 4G/LTE-TDD based wireless broadband services in Delhi and Mumbai in early 2013.
Reliance Infotel is the only company in the country which won 20MHz pan India spectrum on 2300 MHz band to offer 4G/BWA services. Infotel will roll out LTE-TDD services over the spectrum. Till now only Airtel has launched 4G/LTE services in India, available in Kolkata and Bangalore with merely 3000 around subscribers. There is a price barrier to make 4G mass popular.
Optical Network
To support the ultra high speed wireless network RIL needs to make a robust optical fiber network accross the country. The deal has been given to HFCL to lay cables in Delhi, Mumbai and other cities. For making the optical transport infrastructure from a blank RIL selected Ciena, Infinera and Alcatel-Lucent.
LTE Equipment
Samsung does get the order for equipment for RAN (Radio Access Network), Core and access layer for LTE-TDD network of Infotel, though there is no official confirmation. It is supposed to be for Mumbai initially and then for other circles also. It is really good for Samsung as it got the deal competing Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens, Huawei and ZTE. Samsung will supply Smart LTE solution aka eNodeB to Infotel, the first shipment will be delivered by Decemeber, 2012. The core tech framework will be made by Cisco.
Telecom Towers
RIL earlier was planning for renting towers to roll out 4G services in India. Later RIL moved for this assest light model and now plans for deploying own towers, as large as 1 lakh in numbers. The interesting part of RIL's tower plans is its low cost models. RIL is working on a ultra low cost base stations as low as Rs 1 lakh, which is at least 20-40 times cheaper than traditional base stations. RIL will also share these towers to others.
As Indian BWA players have 2300MHz spectrum for 4G roll out, it will have less coverage. So installing more towers is required, so low cost tower model seems to be a better idea.
OSS/BSS (operations support system/business support system):
On telecom many operators just outsource management systems. RIL is also going the same way which is cost effective and better in terms of quality. Reported by Voice&Data RIL has finalized OSS/BSS vendors as below:
customer management, customer relationship management - SAP
service management - HP, Amdocs, and SAP
resource management - HP and Amdocs
order management - Amdocs
quality and problem management - HP
network monitoring - HP Openview
revenue assurance and fraud management - Subex
security management - Microsoft
BIW/BI (Business Information Warehouse/Busines Intelligence) - Green Plum
integration of OSS/BSS modules - IBM
