India's Bharti Airtel has become the first operator to deploy three radio technologies (GSM, UMTS and LTE) on the 900-MHz band within 8.8MHz of bandwidth using Huawei's CloudAIR platform.
CloudAIR is designed to offer spectrum cloudification to allow different radio access technologies to dynamically share air interface resources - including spectrum, power and channel - using an on-demand allocation method.
This allows Airtel's 900-MHz spectrum to serve all three networks simultaneously, improving network spectral efficiency, capacity and the user experience.
The platform was launched in November 2016 and has to date been deployed in more than 30 commercial networks.
CloudAIR gives us the ability to deploy LTE within the same 900MHz frequency alongside GSM and UMTS,” said Airtel CTO Abhay Savargaonkar said.
“This improves our LTE coverage significantly, which means our customers enjoy superior data experience and HD voice quality even in indoor locations.”