Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of Bharti Airtel, today issued a “request and a challenge” to infrastructure vendors to offer integrated networks with support for both TD-LTE and FDD LTE technologies, alongside support for various frequency bands, in order for it to control its infrastructure costs.

While the company is a confirmed backer of TD-LTE, he said the carrier is “looking at, in the not too distant future, using FDD as well, at 1800MHz”.

“India is a country which can ill-afford expensive networks. My ARPUs are going to be sub-$10. And I can’t afford, therefore, heavy investment in infrastructure which is not efficient,” Mittal noted.

Speaking at the GTI LTE TDD/FDD International Summit 2013, the executive described TD-LTE as a “godsend” in providing broadband connectivity in a country that is “woefully short of fixed line”.

And the service is also proving popular with consumers. “We have about 20,000 customers today. I asked ‘what is the experience of our customers? What is the churn level we are experiencing for this particular technology?’ Almost no one is leaving the service. Anyone who signs up, to my mind, is hooked. Because anything else is sub-optimal, not competitive,” he noted.

However, TD-LTE is not without its issues. He said that in the 2.3GHz band it uses, “the network coverage that each base station generates, the propagation, is a series issue, more serious issue than we originally thought”.

And he also said that although the 20MHz of spectrum it has is generous compared to the allocations for 2G and 3G technologies, “20 MHz is again going to pose the same challenges for us in India, some way down the road, as with 2G and 3G spectrum.”