Bharti Airtel has bought out Qualcomm’s remaining stake in their Indian joint venture, assuming full control of the wireless broadband business more than a year earlier than planned.

Qualcomm paid around US$1 billion for 4G licences in order to promote its TD-LTE technology at auction in 2010, but had always expressed intention to exit the market once it lined up an operator partner.

In May 2012 Bharti paid $165 million to acquire a 49 percent stake in the Wireless Business Services Pvt venture and said it planned to assume “complete ownership and financial responsibility for the entities by the end of 2014.”

However, various credible reports state today that the deal has already been struck.

There is no word on how much Bharti paid to increase its stake to 100 per cent.

The venture, which holds TD-LTE 4G airwaves in four of India’s 22 telecommunications zones (Delhi, Mumbai, Haryana and Kerala), has yet to start commercial services. Bharti separately holds LTE-FDD 4G airwaves in four other zones and has started services in some cities.

At Mobile World Congress last February Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of Bharti Airtel, 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 as it aims to deploy 4G services using both unpaired (TDD) and paired (FDD) LTE spectrum.