Bharti Airtel launches 4G services in Kolkata
New Delhi / Kolkata: Bharti Airtel Ltd, India’s largest telecom service provider, started fourth-generation (4G) high-speed Internet services for the first time in the country using the TD-LTE standard on Tuesday. The service was launched in Kolkata, which is also where India’s first mobile phone call was made in 1995. “We will launch in Bangalore in the next 30 days, after that in Pune and then Chandigarh,” said Sanjay Kapoor, chief executive of India and South Asia. The network has been rolled out in partnership with Chinese equipment vendor ZTE and is theoretically capable of 100 megabits per second speeds. “The speed depends on a number of variables including the application being used, the number of people using the service at the same time etc,” Kapoor said. India’s telecom minister Kapil Sibal said at the launch that mobile operators had not lived up to the “challenge” of delivering the “appropriate devices” and the “innovations” required to make 3G’s high bandwidth spectrum ava...