China Mobile reported 940,000 LTE BTS for ~75% population coverage. Based on China Mobile's LTE coverage and adjusting for differences in area/population, our analysis suggests that Reliance Jio Infocomm would need at least 300,000 4G-LTE BTS to achieve population coverage of 80% in India. We expect Jio to launch services with 150k BTS, reaching 300k over the next 10 years.
Airtel will have comparable coverage on 3G/4G vs Jio and superior voice coverage on its 2G network given Jio?s limited 2G/3G spectrum. Airtel has the highest 3G/4G spectrum at 1.2 MHz per million subs, almost 2x that of Vodafone/Idea at 0.6 MHz/0.7 MHz per million
subs.
