Swedish telecom equipment maker Ericsson on Wednesday announced that it has signed a 4-year agreement with Bharti Airtel to roll out a 4G (LTE-FDD) network for customers in Delhi.

In addition to Delhi, Ericsson has also partnered with Airtel to deploy LTE networks in four other circles.  

“India is an important market; it is the third largest in terms of revenue. Many of our global hubs are based out of India,” President and CEO Hans Vestberg said at the company’s flagship technology event ‘Ericsson Connect’ in New Delhi.

As part of the contract, Ericsson will provide multi-standard radio equipment from the Ericsson RBS 6000 base station family for macro and small cell networks.

The agreement also includes deployment of Ericsson’s LTE RAN software for Bharti Airtel.

Ericsson also tied up with Airtel by signing a 4-year agreement to expand 3G WCDMA network across eight telecom circles. The new agreement includes rollout of 3G services in both UMTS 2,100 MHZ and UMTS 900MHz band (in three circles).

Network upgradation As part of the contract, Ericsson will supply, install and perform manage services for WCDMA Radio Access Networks (RAN). It is in talks with real estate companies to increase the quality of network by providing indoor solutions at the time of construction itself.

Vestberg announced the launch of its new Ericsson Radio System and the upgrade of the existing Ericsson Cloud System by introducing Ericsson HDS 8000 (Hyperscale Datacenter System) to the Indian market. Paolo Colella, Head of Region (India), said, “With the new Radio System, operators will be able to address increased demand for mobile broadband and ensure continued subscriber satisfaction. The Ericsson HDS 8000 is built with advanced automation capabilities that take data centres and central offices to a new level of cloud economics, security and efficiency.”

System functions Ericsson Radio System reduces site acquisition issues and delivers three times the capacity density with a 50 per cent improvement in energy efficiency, the company said in a statement.

The system gives network operators the infrastructure they need to support growing mobile data needs, which are predicted to reach 25 Exabytes per month globally by 2020, when 5G is expected to be commercialised. With the Ericsson Radio System, total cost of ownership (TCO) will be reduced by 20 per cent, the statement added.

Ericsson HDS 8000 is a new generation of hyperscale data centre system that uses Intel Rack Scale Architecture for a disaggregated hardware approach, which dramatically improves efficiency, utilisation, automation and TCO.

The company also released its next major software, Ericsson Networks Software 16A, which will feature a new suite of LTE software upgrades, targeting the indoor space.

The new suite features advances in uplink and downlink performance – boosting network uplink speeds by up to 200 per cent, downlink speeds by up to 30 per cent and adding LTE Unlicensed (LTE-U), the first commercial step in Licensed Assisted Access Device.

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