Even though 3G hasn’t entered the Indian context fully till now, and 2G scams blowing all corruption records in india, Indian entrepreneurs don’t look shy in bringing (or at least hoping to bring) the 4G tech soon in India. Yep, we’re happy to learn they want to and in fact are conducting tests for the same, this but what ‘soon’ means here better not be dared to prediction, given the very-long-span of time it took government to bring the 3G tech which is still being offered only by government offices of BSNL and MTNL and lately, single private player, TATA Docomo.

Well, back to 4G arena, we’ve heard that two companies, Reliance Industries Ltd and Qualcomm Inc, seem very eager towards this next-gen tech and have in fact, conducted tests in partnership with Ericsson India.

RIL conducted its tests in own backyard at Reliance Corporate Park, Navi Mumbai, where the brains bringing the upcoming tech are said to reside. The tests, conducted in a complete ecosystem using Ericsson’s global expertise, demonstrated balanced peak speeds of 80 mbps in the downlink and 20 mbps in the uplink. Of course, these are more than dream-come-true speeds for a still 3G-deprived country at far. But, expect the speeds to be around 8-10 mbps at the max in real world conditions. The company was succesful in testing the network on ‘on the move’ speeds of 50 to 70 kms per hour, delivering LIVE TV and HD multimedia streaming applications error-free while seamlessly keeping up with the number of LTE base station sectors.

On the other hand, Qualcomm performed its tests in a mobile van, the emphasis being on maintaining session continuity, and was successful too.

Just so that you know, RIL has pan India LTE-TDD Licence in the 2.3 GHz frequency band while Qualcomm has the air waves in four circles, including Mumbai and Delhi.

While Qualcomm’s interests in LTE-TDD alone weren’t viewed as a threat by WiMAX fans — that includes companies too — in India, interest shown by RIL (India’s Number 1 Company) in LTE is quite frightening to say the least, as far as WiMAX’s future in India is concerned.

But the questions that remains wide open is: Can India really get the 4G services in time, given the very-slow-moving govt approval system and the never-declining rate at which scams are hitting the telecom industry like never before? We leave it to your judgement (although we know it)!

Source: RIL Tests; Qualcomm Tests