After Bharati Airtel, Aircel is all set to launch its own Commercial 4th Generation platform in India by December 2015.

Briefing mediapersons here, K. Sankaranarayanan, the Strategic Business Unit Head of Aircel, South India, said that the mobile phone platform is soon to expand into 4G to cater to the data usage needs of the country. Aircel now covers 96 percent of the state with 2G data.

“We are now involved in increasing our 3G platform and have covered as many as 40 percent of our users. Once 4G is introduced, we are planning to change plans from 3G to 4G using the same SIM cards. We will also install new towers and upgrade existing 3G towers to 4G,” Sankaranarayanan said. As part of its 3G expansion, Aircel has launched a 3G Experience Bus in Coimbatore which will tour remote areas in the region and let people experience its fast network.

Last year, excluding Chennai, Aircel had only 1353 towers in Tamil Nadu last year. The count has now increased to 2624 3G towers. Chennai now has 1800 additional towers.

“The percentage of data users on Aircel has increased by 32.4 percent. We have 10 lakh new data users. The data revenue has increased from 5.7 percent to 9.2 percent” he added.

Revealing that India is fast approaching the average International Data Usage of 400–500 MB per month, Sankaranarayanan said that average data consumption in Tamil Nadu is 275 MB per month and growing. “There is a huge data Tsunami in India and Tamil Nadu is in the forefront,” he opined.

He said that the increase in data usage is also because of cheaper price. Data is available in India at a cost of Rs.190 per 1 GB, but it is almost USD 40 in the western countries.