Huawei banking on 4G LTE roll-outs in India

Despite taking a revenue hit in India due to payment defaults by telecom operators in the aftermath of the cancellation of 2G licences, Chinese telecom major Huawei is banking on 4G LTE roll-outs and high-speed data demand to drive up its revenues from India in the coming days.

With China holding back on the roll out of 4G LTE, India has become the largest telecom market in the world to adopt 4G LTE technology and Huawei is already rolling out services for winners of broadband wireless access (4G) spectrum. In May it launched the 4G LTE services of Airtel in Bangalore.

"In China, on the technology side LTE is ready. What is really important and what is not there is spectrum and the Chinese government has not made that available as yet," Huawei Technologies vice president for corporate media affairs Scott Sykes said during a recent media interaction.

While India had 919.2 million mobile subscribers as of March 2012 the figure for China stood a 1012.5 million for the same period. "In India broadband penetration is just about 1 per cent. When you look at 2G or voice penetration we see progress upwards of 75 per cent. We expect a similar kind of phenomena in broadband space," says A Sethuraman, ED, Huawei Telecommunications (India).

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