Reliance Jio is reportedly testing a more advanced set of LTE technology to boost its pan India 4G network and is planning to roll out LTE A networks in major cities within the next few months.
Reliance officially launched Jio network on 5th September this year and has been offering free data, calling and messaging over the same to attain is target of 100 million customers.
The company is testing carrier aggregation on pan India scale to spruce up its network speed and reliability. "Initially Jio can cover all major cities and towns where the speeds have come down", Telecomtalk quoted a source close to the company.
Carrier aggregation is a technique that uses more than one carrier to increase overall bandwidth of the transmission. This allows more users to be connected simultaneously without affecting the speed of the network. To deploy this solution, Jio would need to adhere to a more advanced set of standards requiring cutting edge transmission technology. The whole upgrade is termed LTE Advanced, which is also quite self explanatory.
Adding 4G infrastructure on a national scale would need time, and while all the major telecom companies were in a race to get it up and running, the launch of "free" Jio service got things dwindling for most of them.
If and when the upgrade is done, the Reliance Jio network will be able to offer theoretical download speed of up to 175mbps, about five times faster than what the current infrastructure offers.
The company is also expected to launch more LYF devices that support the LTE A network. It has only one such phone in its arsenal, called the 'Future Ready'.
Download speed on the Jio network started to decline about a month after the launch as more and more subscribers opted for its free welcome offer. App maker Speedtest confirmed the downgrade of download speed on the network that rose from 5mbps in June to over 25mbps during the launch period, and declined sharply in October to less than 5mbps. The speeds reportedly fell to 500kbps at most places under the network.
