Reliance -Infotel Broadband has BWA spectrum and planned to deploy LTE across circles. LTE in 2011 was an emerging technology being developed by 3GPP. From an operators perspective, LTE provided technical benefits such as more flexible spectrum usage and fewer nodes and economic benefits such as increased spectrum efficiency and optimized backhaul.
LTE as a technology was more suited to portfolio expansion from existing 2G/3G operations to include a diverse range of mobile service elements rather than as a pure LTE deployment. The spectrum sharing norm proposed by the DoT came to the rescue of RIL, which could then enter into spectrum sharing agreements with RCOM to provide voice services using 2G services and data using the LTE network with hotspot deployment.
Reliance’s Four stratgies of LTE deployment
- Hotspot coverage: LTE deployment is limited to major urban hotspots, analogous to current Wi-Fi hotspot deployments, although the area covered by LTE is much larger than the localized, low-power coverage of Wi-Fi.
- Urban coverage: LTE is deployed in urban areas and the surrounding suburbs.
- National coverage: LTE is deployed to provide the same coverage as existing 2G and 3G mobile networks.
- Home base stations: LTE is assumed to be deployed in individual subscriber’s homes, communicating with a core network infrastructure through a mesh network.
How collaboration with RCOM will provide significant advantages to RIL / Infotel Broadband?
- Capacity boost: LTE-TDD hotspots provided capacity boosts and RIL could increase its capacity at known hotspots and data usage centers
- Wide area coverage: RIL could piggyback on 2G/3G wide area coverage and provide seamless voice and data connectivity across the network
- Backhaul requirement using RCOM optic fibers: RCOM had a high-quality optic fiber network, which was utilized by RIL to carry its huge data traffic.
