CSO, Indosat: “Look to develop the TD-LTE device ecosystem quickly”

Prashant Gokarn, Chief Strategy Officer Of Indosat Is Speaking At The Td-Lte Conference In April

Prashant Gokarn, is Chief Strategy Officer of Indosat the second largest operator in Indonesia with over 60 million subscribers. He is speaking on Day One of the The inaugural TD-LTE Summit, taking place on the 23rd-24th April 2013 at the Fairmont Singapore Hotel, Singapore. Ahead of the show we speak to him about where Indosat is with LTE.

You have recently received approval to deploy LTE services. Why is it so important for Indosat to deploy LTE?

Our intention is to differentiate ourselves as an operator on the strength of our high-end wireless broadband. A key way to achieve that is by using our spectrum assets more effectively – which means LTE.

What will the impact of LTE in Indonesia? What will the key benefits be?

At present, the quality and availability of fixed-line broadband in the country is poor. LTE enables us to offer our customers a high-speed option, which will make video and rich media applications much more accessible to customers.

Why are you selecting TD-LTE? Do you believe the TD-LTE is a better choice for delivering mobile data than FDD LTE?

On the technology aspects, TDD has the advantage in that it can allocate bandwidth to downlink on-the-fly making it more spectrum efficient. However, the ecosystem of TD-LTE is still nascent and under-developed compared to FD-LTE, which today at least, places it at a big disadvantage.

Is there are role for both FDD and TD-LTE in your region? Will they have different use cases?

There is a role for both FDD and TDD LTE. The use cases may be different in the short term as the ecosystem for FDD is better tuned to smartphones while TDD-LTE is still dongle focused

Does TD-LTE offer up any specific challenges around backhaul?

The link budgets and spread mean you need a fairly dense network at 2.3GHz TD-LTE in order to be able to deliver the performance.

What would you say to any operators considering the move to TD-LTE?

Look to develop the TD-LTE device ecosystem, and do it quickly!

The inaugural TD-LTE Summit is taking place on the 23^rd-24^th April 2013 at the Fairmont Singapore Hotel, Singapore. Click here to download a flyer.