India's Aircel goes 4G with China's ZTE

Indian LTE licensee Aircel will roll out its network on ZTE equipment, further extending its partnership with the Chinese networking vendor. 

The telco in 2010 was awarded broadband wireless access (BWA) licenses for eight telecom circles across India and had been prepping its network to meet increasing demand and in a bid to become the country's second operator to offer LTE services, after Bharti Airtel. 

As part of the first deployment phase, ZTE will roll out LTE network for Aircel in Chennai, Rest of Tamil Nadu circle, and a handful of other business-critical circles, according to a Times Of India report. The initial rollout will provide data speeds of 65Mbps.

ZTE had deployed Aircel's 2G and 3G networks in three circles of India's north zone, and will now design, supply, and implement the telco's LTE network.

"We are happy to partner with ZTE for the deployment of our 4G LTE Networks in India. With this association, we are confident in delivering 'next-generation' networks, critical to meet the growing demand of data in the country," Aircel CMO Anupam Vasudev said. "The huge demand for Internet-enabled devices, such as smartphones and tablets among the largely young population, along with increase in consumption of data on Internet and rising demand for content, are some of the factors fueling the exponential growth in data."

ZTE India CEO Xu Dejun added: "With this alliance, we have strongly established ourselves as the partner of choice for the telecom operators in the country; to develop and maintain their LTE ecosystem and also contributed to our long term vision of developing sustainable LTE in India."