The Indonesian telco aims to reach 35 additional cities with LTE by year-end
Indonesian mobile operator XL Axiata commercially launched LTE services in the country’s capital city of Jakarta, The Jakarta Post reported. XL Axiata said it expects to reach 35 cities across the country with LTE by the end of 2015.
XL Axiata’s LTE services offer access speeds up to 150 megabits per second in the cities of Yogyakarta, Medan, Lombok, Bali, Surabaya and Bandung, and looks to expand the service in Pekanbaru, Batam, Palembang, Manado and Banjarmasin as well as six other cities by the end of November.
The operator expects to have approximately 1,500 LTE base stations in Jakarta and 3 million LTE subscribers in the city by the end of 2015. The telco currently operates 1,100 LTE base stations in Jakarta.
Dian Siswarini, XL Axiata president director, said the commercial launch was part of the refarming program of the country’s 1800 MHz band.
“Now that we have finished our band refarming process, we can continue to focus on developing the quality of our 4G service. With the arrival of super-fast Internet in Indonesia, the market’s behavior will change due to an increasingly wired economy,” the executive said.
Meanwhile, XL Axiata’s VP for LTE, Pantro Pander Silitonga, said the telco expects to migrate its 3G base to 4G in approximately three years.
XL Axiata initially launched LTE services in the country in 2014 through spectrum in the 900 MHz band. According to the report, the telco currently has 1.2 million subscribers using its LTE network.
Rival operators Telkomsel, Indosat, 3 Indonesia and Smartfren have already launched 4G trials using spectrum in the 1800 MHz band.
XL Axiata ended the third quarter with a claimed 20 million data subscribers, which represents 49% of XL Axisata’s overall subscriber base, according to the company’s latest financial results. XL’s smartphone penetration had grown to 39% of the telco’s base at the end of September with the number of smartphone users growing 7% year-on-year, reaching 15.6 million users at the end of the quarter.
XL Axiata is controlled by the Axiata Group, which also owns mobile operations in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India and Singapore.
