airtel
Bharti Airtel on Thursday announced the launch of its 4G LTE mobile services in 296 towns across the country.

The pan-India commercial launch of Airtel’s 4G services follows the telecom operator’s 4G trials in major cities across the country over the past year. These cities included Delhi, Hyderabad, Visakhapatnam, Madurai, Chennai, Coimbatore, and Mumbai.

During the trial stage, Airtel had said it will assimilate customer feedback from these early adopters and leverage the initial market response towards strengthening its 4G services in these cities,

Airtel has also announced “go-to-market partnerships” with Samsung and Flipkart for 4G devices. The company had started its 4G services in 2012 with the first launch in Kolkata.

The telecom major has tied up with Chinese telecom equipment and network solution firm Huawei for 4G network rollout in Delhi circle.

Existing customers across these cities can now avail of a complimentary upgrade to Airtel 4G SIM, and get 4G data at 3G prices.

Bharti Airtel had over 324 million customers across its operations at the end of March 2015, as per data available on its website.

Earlier this week, Airtel posted a 40 percent jump in consolidated net profit to Rs. 1,554.3 crores for the first quarter ended June 30, 2015-16, on account of sale of mobile tower assets and boom in data usage. It had posted net profit of Rs. 1,108.5 crores in the April- June quarter of last fiscal, 2014-15. Mobile data or Internet revenue of the company grew by 67.3 percent, year-on-year (y-o-y) basis, to Rs. 2,609 crores. The mobile data customer base of the company increased by 25.8 percent to 4.95 crores at the end of the quarter, from 3.93 crores in the year-ago period.