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India saw enormous growth in 4G adoption and LTE roaming
Inter-regional 4G LTE roaming has grown by 3,300 per cent year on year, according to new data released by Syniverse.
The data was gathered by analysing data traffic across Syniverse’s platform.
“Syniverse is proud to have played a pivotal role in driving this quadruple-digit growth in outbound 4G roaming, which demonstrates significant progress toward achieving technological advancement goals in the region while delivering the customer experiences that India’s mobile users demand,” said Himanshu Goel, vice president and managing director, India, Middle East and Africa, Syniverse.
The growth in LTE roaming was fuelled by an 80 per cent increase in shipments of LTE enabled handsets to India in 2017.
“As a result, India is poised for explosive communications growth, as demonstrated by these impressive growth numbers and reinforced through the Digital India initiative as well as the government’s recently launched draft of the National Digital Communications Policy 2018.”
Despite the strong growth figures, India remains one of the world’s toughest markets for telcos to turn a profit. Ultra-fine margins and a heavily saturated market mean that many telcos are being forced to hunker down and weather the storm of India’s current market conditions, with both Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio looking to raise external capital.
