India's Tower Companies Could Invest Rs 2 Trillion by 2025 for 5G Roll Out, Timeline of Tower Companies of India

There was a old post from 2017 - regarding the tower companies of India. However after Jio's entry with 4G in 2016 the scenario of Indian Telecom had changed a lot. As the mobile service providers saw ruthless merger and acquisition, the same came for tower space too. 

At present there are only handful of tower companies in India - top three companies are Summit Digitel, Indus Towers, American Tower Co. , just like the three pvt. telecom service providers - Jio, Airtel and Vi. Though in this space there are few smaller players survived - GTL, Aster.

As 5G is coming, the tower companies have found new zeal - by 2025 their investment could reach Rs 2 trillion to take care of 5G roll out. 

Spectrum Refarming for LTE Extended to 900 MHz, to be to 2100MHz

Airtel, presently India's 2nd largest mobile operator has refarmed spectrum on 900MHz (band 8) band in Mumbai to roll out LTE900 as announced on February 15th. The LTE network of Airtel in Mumbai will get further boost as the company will install 7000 new BTS as well as 400km of fiber optic line across the metro circle. With carrier aggregation of 3CA and pre-5G massive MIMO Airtel's LTE network is capable of delivering world class services. Under Project Leap, Airtel is transforming the LTE network with massive MIMO and CA since 2018. 

Currently Airtel is working with its network partners Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei and ZTE to bring LTE900 to another 9 circles - Delhi, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Kolkata, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, North-East, Assam and Rajasthan in phased manner. It should be noted that Airtel already refarmed spectrum on 1800MHz usually used for 2G, for LTE deployment. 

That will bring Airtel's LTE network over 2300MHz, 1800MHz and 900MHz at par with Jio's LTE network. Later's LTE signal flies over 2300MHz, 1800MHz and 850MHz. Vodafone Idea will also follow the suit, as post merger they have ample of 900MHz, 1800MHz and 2100MHz spectrum. However Vodafone Idea's main LTE signals are on 1800MHz and 2300/2500MHz. 

Road to 5G: 4G/4.9G/5G Modems

I am seperating the 5G modem story from the original blog post - Gigabit LTE - Global Progress and India's approach to 5G. 

Early Gigabit-LTE supported modems

Qualcomm has X16 LTE modem which supports Gigabit LTE. At present Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset has this modem. A lot of present day flagships like Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+, Sony XZ Premium, HTC U11, Motorola Z2 Force Edition, Xiaomi Mix 2, Xiaomi Mi 6, Essential’s One, OnePlus 5, OPPO Find 9 are capable of 1Gbps LTE speed. 

Qualcomm has another modem - X20 LTE modem which is technically advanced in few ways - support for 5x carrier aggregation (5x20MHz), increased number of usable spatial streams from 10 to 12, 10nm LPE processing. X20 will show its power in Snapdragon 845 chipsets which will be used by many flagships of 2018. 

Vodafone 3G vs 4G : Review at Kolkata

Last week I made my first MNP - ported my Tata Docomo prepaid GSM number to Vodafone prepaid. The reason behind porting was Tata Docomo has no 3G in Kolkata. The process was pretty fast - I generated porting code on 2nd August and submitted at Vodafone store that day. On 5th Tata Docomo SIM got switched off and Vodafone SIM is activated on the same day after televerification.

The Vodafone SIM card I received, is a 4G enabled SIM. So I planned for a 4G vs 3G speed test on Vodafone.

During the televerification I was told that using MyVodafone app will get me 100MB 3G/4G data. However I received the data on 13th and made some speedtests using SpeedTest.net app and Jio's NetVelocity app.