Airtel today announced that it will deploy Massive MIMO Pre-5G technology across IPL match venues, making sure that its customers continue to enjoy superfast data experience on Airtel 4G when they watching the match. Massive MIMO expands existing network capacity by five to seven times over existing spectrum, thereby improving spectral efficiency.
“Customers will be able to experience superfast data speeds on Airtel’s 4G network despite the very large number of concurrent users on the network sites at the venue,” said Airtel.
Airtel will deploy the Massive MIMO solution in IPL match venues in Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mohali, Indore, Jaipur, Bengaluru and Chennai. The first venue to go live with Airtel’s Massive MIMO deployment will be the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai where the first match of the IPL will be played tomorrow, April 7, 2018.
Massive MIMO creates 3D beams both on horizontal and vertical planes towards users located within its coverage footprint. This helps in improving coverage and reducing interference across users in different beams, thereby improving signal quality (SINR) by 2-3dB. Serving multiple users by re-using same set of resource blocks (MU-MIMO) with improved signal quality helps in improving user experience, cell capacity and spectrum efficiency.
Airtel will also let the users stream IPL marches for free via Hotstar by downloading the new version of the Airtel TV app, which also comes with a dedicated cricket section and loads of interactive games and content.
Commenting on the same, Shyam Mardikar, CTO – Mobile, Bharti Airtel:
As part of our endeavour to offer a seamless high speed 4G experience to our customers, we are deploying this advanced Pre-5G solution to enable a high speed and high capacity in-stadia network experience at IPL match venues. We believe this will enhance the digital experience for our customers and enable them to share, post and stream content seamlessly even in locations with massive crowds.
Airtel was the first mobile operator in India to commercially deploy Massive MIMO last year.