Olive Telecom has joined hands with Yota, a Russian operator which also sells devices, to bring in TDD LTE (Indian operators are using this technology) based dongles and fixed routers.
Yota Devices sold more than 1 million modems and routers in 2012, representing 6 per cent of the LTE device market – modems and routers.
Last year, Olive Telecom had also joined hands with Israeli vendor Altair Semiconductor to develop products for India’s BWA (Broadband Wireless Access) market.
Though Olive Telecom has been tight lipped about its plans, the company told The Mobile Indian that it is in talks with biggest operators in LTE space to bring in devices based on LTE technology.
While, currently the market for TDD LTE devices in India is very small as only Airtel has launched 4G services in four cities, many telecos are likely to launch their services in this year itself.
Reliance Jio infocomm, which is the sole pan India operator for 4G services, is likely to launch the services by the end of the current year, and has already said that it has finalised many agreements with device vendors, technology partners and content providers. Samsung is reported to be one of the device partners and Datawind, makers of Aakash tablets, is also likely to be one of the players in the LTE device market.
Aircel is also likely to launch its services by end of this year, though they had planned a launch by December 2012 itself but plan seems to have got delayed and now the officials at Aircel are not ready to commit any new dates of this launch.