Nepal Telecom announced plans to shut down its CDMA network in the new fiscal year starting on July 1 to release spectrum for 4G services.
Dilli ram Adhikari, general manager of Nepal Telecom, told local media myrepublic that the operator would start using CDMA spectrum for LTE services sometime in the 2020-2021 fiscal year.
As a condition for obtaining two 10MHz frequency bands of 800MHz spectrum in February 2019, Nepal Telecom authority requires the market leader to return part of its CDMA spectrum.
According to data from GSMA think tank, by the end of December 2019, Nepal Telecom had 1.3 million CDMA 2G users.
The operator, which owns 53% of the local market, opened CDMA network in 2006. It launched 4G network at the end of 2012 and had 3.6 million LTE users by the end of 2019, accounting for 16% of its total users.
