Ericsson to Enable India’s First 'FDD LTE' Rollout on Airtel Network

Airtel, one of India's largest telecom operators is set to roll out India’s first FDD LTE network in association with global telecoms equipment major Ericsson.

“We are going to provide our equipment to power Airtel’s FDD LTE rollout in India. We cannot provide any further details on this, but this is going to the first FDD LTE launch for India,” informed, Chris Houghton, Head of Region India. he announced this on the sidelines of Ericsson Connect event in New Delhi.

At present, Airtel is already operating 4G on TDD LTE in a number of cities including – Kolkata, Bengaluru, Pune, Chandigarh, Mohali, Panchkula, Ludhiana, Jalandhar, Amritsar, Kapurthala, Phagwara, Hoshiarpur, Patiala, Nagpur & Nasik.

As a next generation technology, LTE is programmed to support both the paired spectrum for Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) and unpaired spectrum for Time Division Duplex (TDD).

Regarded as a futuristic technology, FDD LTE uses a paired spectrum that comes from migration path of the existing 3G network, on the other hand TDD LTE uses an unpaired spectrum band that evolved from TD-SCDMA.

Most importantly, there is no need for paired spectrum in case of TDD LTE as transmission and reception occurs in the same channel. And this is the reason why operators in India have gone for TDD LTE.

This is perhaps one of the reasons why TD-LTE is regarded by many experts as cheaper when compared with FDD-LTE since in TD-LTE there is no need for a ‘diplexer’ to isolate transmission and receptions for an operator.