Airtel began its 4G operations in the country starting from Kolkata as India’s first operator to roll out commercial 4G-LTE services. As of now Airtel offers only data services over 4G network, and offers a multimode 4G-LTE dongle (Huawei E392) and a Indoor WiFi CPE (Huawei B593). More details of Airtel 4G plans and devices can be found here.

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We, team telecomtalk did get a chance to make an exclusive review of Airtel 4G at their corporate office at Infinity Building, Saltlake, Kolkata.

Airtel 4G LTE Dongle:

Earlier I mentioned that the dongle is only 4G supported as I heard from Airtel officials at launch event, but there it was clarified that Huawei E392 is a multimode dongle and supports 2G/3G and 4G. In the launch event the dongle was presented there was a ZTE single mode dongle as a test dongle.

Using the dongle is pretty straight forward, just plug it to computer’s USB slot and automatically driver and dialer UI will be installed. In case you have installed Huawei Mobile Partner v23 on your computer it will auto-start after you plug in the dongle. You can create the profile on the dialer UI using APN ‘airtelgprs.com’, and connect to internet.

At Airtel office I was getting signal strength RSSI -71dBm, which is better than 3G signals of many operators (>= 51dBm is best signal strength).

Speedtest results were impressive ones, with Indian servers ping less than 100ms, download speeds 15Mbit/s+ and upload speed is around 4Mbit/s. With the servers abroad download speed was around 10Mbit/s and upload was around 1Mbit/s, while ping was >200ms.