Indonesia’s XL Axiata aims to have between 8 million and 10 million subscribers to its LTE service by the end of next year, and plans to expand its 1800-MHz network to help achieve this target.
The operator has attracted 1.2 million LTE customers to date, and aims to increase this to between 8 million and 10 million by end-2016, the Jakarta Postreported, citing XL mobile data general manager Roy Wisnu Wibowo.
XL plans to gradually expand its improved 1,800-MHz LTE service starting from November pending the government's spectrum refarming initiative. The company was one of five mobile operators to launch LTE services over the band in July.
The operator is now looking to expand the network to other major cities, including Jakarta, Surabaya, Bandung, Bali and Bogor.
Consumers have expressed dissatisfaction with the performance of XL's existing 900-MHz LTE network. Roy said the 1800-MHz network guarantees a better performance than the existing service.
To help promote its 1800-MHz service and meet its subscriber targets, the company has launched a new data package to allow customers in rollout cities to save their unused data allocations each month to use on the 1800-MHz network once services launch in the cities in November.