The company is making the investment in a bid to serve high-density urban areas and to offload traffic from its core network, as AIS looks to meet growing customer demand and ease congestion considering the increasing amount of spectrum and bandwidth on network infrastructure.
Small cell technology allows operators to roll out networks at a faster rate than traditional base stations, while also reducing operational and implementation costs.
AIS said its small cell sites are designed to provide radio footprint with a 300-500m range, supporting downlink peak data rates of 42Mbps.
“Our targeted areas for the small cell network will be tourist destinations and community shopping malls,” said Kittisak Ngarmchatetanarom, VP for central region operations at AIS.
The company has already obtained permission from 8,000 communities to build the new towers.
AIS has built 15,200 base stations for 2G service, plus 19,300 3G base stations operating on 2100MHz, covering 95% of the population.
Earlier this year, AIS boosted its investment in 3G infrastructure to $2.7 billion.
