Time Division-LTE Rollout Strategies for Wireless Service Providers’ in India

India has a potential to play a leading role in the emergence of global information society. To provide substantial contribution in this segment, empowerment of the masses with telecom services is pivotal. TD-LTE has a potential to deliver a monumental contribution in the process of empowerment. At present, the development of TD-LTE ecosystem is in infant stage for Indian telecom market. The fundamental objective of this thesis is to find out the successful strategies for the rollout of TD-LTE services in Indian telecom market. The thesis work focuses on three main segment, the General Strategies for SPs’; the Pricing Strategy; and Device Ecosystem development strategy. Mixed method of research was followed during the thesis work. In the initial phase, main focus was on understanding the dynamics and regulatory nature of Indian telecom market. Steps taken to accomplish this objective involve literature review and collecting data from various sources of evidences. In the second phase, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 respondents across 5 different Indian cities. Analysing the interview responses in deductive manner helped to form 22 research questions that were published in the form of survey. The paper survey was respondent by 34 respondents across 7 different Indian cities. In the last phase, the paper survey results and valuable interaction with the survey respondents were used to formulate the results and set of recommendations. The SPs’ should focus on partnership/agreement formation and Customer Care innovation during initial phase of TD-LTE rollout. The SPs’ should aim to use TD-LTE services to increase the total number of postpaid data subscribers rather than to ‘generate TD-LTE revenue’. To accomplish this, the SPs’ should isolate the high ARPU prepaid subscribers and target 2G/3G prepaid-to-LTE migration strategy. The migration can be achieved by offering attractive innovative pricing plans, like combining 3G and 4G data; incentivised High end smartphones on longer contract; and leveraging the enhanced capacity characteristics of TD-LTE over 3G