MTS to offer 14.7 Mbps speeds through CDMA dongles

MTS, the mobile telephony services brand of Sistema Shyam TeleServices (SSTL), plans to upgrade its network to EVDO Rev B platform. This new technology is an advancement over the currently deployed Rev A.
With this new platform, MTS will be able to offer speeds of up to 14.7 Mbps. Currently, the CDMA operator offers speeds of up to 3.1 Mbps through its Rev A network in 84 cities.
The company, however, declined to give a specific timeline on the upgrade.
Leonid Musatov, chief marketing officer, Sistema Shyam Teleservices Ltd (SSTL), said, “We certainly plan to migrate from Rev A to Rev B; but due to strategic reasons we would not be able to share a definite migration timeline.”
He added, “MTS would like to extend MBlaze to 100 cities by the year end. We intend to cover 20 per cent of the data subscribers’ market share by 2012.”
MTS has 2.5 lakh data subscribers using its MBlaze service (CDMA dongles). It offers MBlaze at speeds of up to 3.1 Mbps in 84 major cities across India.
Leonid Musatov said, “The Wireless Broadband data market is still relatively small, but is growing at an extremely fast pace. Given this context, MTS is clearly one of the major players and leader in the prepaid segment within the Indian mobile broadband market.”
Data subscribers are a very sought after segment as they bring very high ARPU (average revenue per user). For the mobile broadband industry, blended ARPUs (prepaid and postpaid), are generally about Rs 700.
This is why 3G auctions garnered such a high price. Tata Teleservices, which also offers CDMA based high speed data services, has tried the Rev B platform and announced that it too will upgrade its network.