UPDATED: 26/9. LIVE FROM LTE ASIA, SINGAPORE: Data growth in India’s four top cities expanded 120 per cent over the past year, spurring the country’s fourth largest player Aircel to step up its migration to LTE.

The operator launched 4G service in six states, with a focus on largest cities, and has plans to expand into two additional service areas where it has spectrum by the end of the year, revealed Aircel CTO Sameer Dave during his keynote at the event this morning.

Data growth at the state level, where network speeds have typically lagged those in major cities, has increased by 80-150 per cent. Five websites/apps generate more than 50 per cent of data usage and 10 account for almost 70 per cent of traffic, which is driving its need for 4G, he said.

Aircel has about 4.6 million 2G users in Chennai and 80 million total connections across India, which expanded 24 per cent over the last two years.

Looking at the country as a whole, Dave said India is on track to add an estimated 92 million new mobile broadband users over the next two years, with penetration expected to rise 10 points to 41 per cent in 2017.

Mobile internet users are forecast to jump from 254 million in 2013 to 436 million by 2017. He contrasted that growth by noting that fixed internet connections are expected to only increase from 35 million to 37 million between 2015 and 2017.

India, the world’s fourth largest mobile market with 941 million connections, just saw the introduction of 4G services in selected cities this year with spectrum acquired mostly in the March auction.

Dave complained that India has the highest price of spectrum per megahertz in the world and that only 6 per cent of its spectrum is sub-1GHz airwaves.

Aircel plans to move to TDD-FDD carrier aggregation by the end of 2017, he said.