Nepal Telecom, the government owned telecom operator is known to have testing 4G in their network. The operator had already got license to operate 4G in Kathmandu and Pokhara. As per the letter to NTA in reply to the progress for 4G, Nepal Telecom mentions the test to have already started. Earlier they had written to launch 4G in the second week of Poush 2073. It is not clear whether they will launch in the same date or some days after.
As there are no any official words for the launching of 4G by Ncell, it seems Nepal Telecom will be the first one to launch 4G in the country. The frequency of operation for 4G will be in 1800 MHz. Both the operators are also known to have taken out some chunk of bandwidth from the existing frequency used for 2G. In their proposal to launch 4G, they had submitted the chunk of frequency to be 5MHz. They have also asked some more frequency bandwidth for 4G.
Nepal Telecom is making use of the existing infrastructure of the current network for 4G, with some slight hardware and software modifications. Ncell is also doing the same for its 4G roll-out.
LTE, Long term Evolution is the technology for 4G. Operators throughout the world are using different variants of LTE for 4G and beyond. As told by Nepal Telecom, the maximum speed that a user can get from the 4G tower is 30 Mbps. This is possible during the initial launch. But for a loaded case (after operating for some period), the speed may go down. Though the speed in some cases is comparable to 3G network, the experience is somewhat steady due to low latency. The speed that we can get from 3G (HSPA+) network is also 21 Mbps. Also the real time broadcast and HD video streaming will be very smooth from 4G.
Tell us what do you expect from the 4G network. If you want to check your handset for 4G, do write it down below your handset model and we will reply if its compatible with 4G to be available here.
