India's Aircel ushered in the new year by contracting ZTE to deploy an LTE network.
The operator plans to roll out LTE starting in Chennai, parts of Tamil Nadu and a few other areas. The network will at launch offer speeds of 65 Mbps.
Aircel secured 2.3-GHz LTE licenses in eight of India's 22 telecom circles during the 2010 broadband wireless access (BWA) auction, paying 34.38 billion rupees ($555.4 million) for the privilege.
The agreement comes as ZTE completes project to migrate Aircel's data services to the vendor's LTE evolved packet core equipment in the Chennai and Rest of Tamil Nadu telecom circles.
Aircel CMO Anupam Vasudev said the India's explosive data growth demonstrates the strong potential for LTE in India.
“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 fuelling the exponential growth in data.”
Indian incumbent Bharti Airtel launched India's first LTE service back in April 2012.