4G Connections In India To Reach 100 Million By 2020: Ericsson

BARCELONA: India will have more than 100 million 4G connections by 2020 and 3G will remain main technology to drive mobile broadband growth for next three years, Ericsson India head Chris Houghton said here.

"In India, we expect 3G to remain the main technology to drive mobile broadband growth at least for next three years. We do expect to see an uptake of 4G around 2016-17 with the 4G numbers going to over 100 million by the year 2020," Houghton told reporters here.

Ericsson President and CEO Hans Vestberg said, "LTE (4G) subscriber growth will exceed 80% and world mobile broadband coverage will be above 70percent."

He said to achieve this growth, Indian telecom operators need more spectrum and further strengthen their network.

India started spectrum auction putting frequencies worth around Rs 82,000 crore on offer.

"Right now India's challenge is spectrum. There is huge amount of unlicensed spectrum. We have come up with license assisted solution using which operators if they want can have licensed spectrum for controlled services to meet regulatory requirement and then use unlicensed band to offload traffic," Ericsson Global Head for Business Unit Radio Arun Bansal said.

Houghton said India is the most expensive place for spectrum. He said that solutions that are adopted in the country are doing well abroad.

Read More: India Inc Hails Surprise Rate Cut By RBI
Watch Out For The Biggest IPOs In 2015