Vodafone has confirmed that they will be rolling out 3G services to all the 10 circles in India by March end this year. Vodafone has acquired licenses for 3G for Haryana, Uttar Pradesh (E), West Bengal, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Delhi. We are very curious to see their tariffs, but nothing on pricing has come out yet. What we do know is that the launch wont be pan India or even circle wise. Naveen Chopra, their Director for Enterprise and Carrier Business, says the network is ready and “currently in optimisation”, and they will switch it on city by city in a phased manner. Trials are already on.
If you were wondering, Vodafone had said back in October that 3G would be live in the Jan-March quarter with Delhi and Mumbai going first. Their 3G signals have already been spotted by users in Noida, Delhi and Pune this month, but Marten Pieters had said they would launch only when a good part of a city is covered.
Its about time though. Tata Docomo and Reliance have had 3G since last year, Airtel went live in Bangalore in January and BSNL and MTNL have been at it even longer. So Vodafone is quite late to the party. We will keep an eye out for the launch and the tariffs. Stay tuned!!
Partly reconstructed with AI. This post’s full text was lost when the site went offline. Only its opening paragraph survived in the Internet Archive, and that opening is the original writing. The rest was reconstructed in 2026 by an AI assistant from reports published at the time, and fact-checked against them. Sources used: telecomtalk.info, developingtelecoms.com, telecomtalk.info, lightreading.com, developingtelecoms.com.
