Vodafone to soon extend 4G service to Gujarat, Haryana, UP East and West Bengal circles

Vodafone the 2nd largest operator in India by subscriber base and the largest 4G operator worldwide has today announced the intent to launch 4G services to 4 new circles under phase 2. The operator currently has services in 5 circles of Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Kerala, Karnataka and will now extend the list with Gujarat, Haryana, UP East and West Bengal circles, taking the list up to 9 circles.

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The 9 circles comprise approximately 70% of Vodafone’s data revenue. The operator already has 1 crore plus data subscribers in Delhi NCR alone. With this expansion the operator aims at extending its 4G footprint across 1000 towns by the end of this year. The operator is setting up new cell sites at the rate of 5 sites per hour in Q4 and laying approximately 40 KMs of fiber a day. The old cell sites are being replaced with single RAN sites which can support 3G, 4G and 5G with simple software upgrade and in metro circles like Delhi and Mumbai it has deployed self optimising network (SON) technology.

Sunil Sood the CEO and MD of Vodafone India informed that the 4G services in the phase 2 circles will also be launched using its existing 1800 MHz spectrum that the operator holds, though he refrained from commenting whether the company is planning on deploying narrow band LTE in some of the circles where it holds less than 5MHz of liberalised spectrum. Narrow band LTE needs blocks of 1.4 or 3 MHz paired or unpaired spectrum and can deliver slower speeds in comparison to traditional LTE using a minimum block size of 5MHz.