Airtel CEO, Telecom News, ET Telecom
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NEW DELHI: Bharti Airtel said that its “Uber-like” digital model with the local cable operator partners is helping the company accelerate the roll out of fiber-based broadband services in the country. It will continue to step up investments to take our network to 2000 towns across India with 35 million home passes in the next 3 years.
“Our innovative Uber-like digital model with the Local Cable Operator partner as also the acceleration in the roll out of our own fiber in the top 100 cities are the pivots around which our home broadband strategy revolves,” Gopal Vittal, CEO of Bharti Airtel said on Wednesday.
In its Broadband business, Airtel is seeing healthy customer additions driven by the increased demand of Fiber to the Home. “We have now hit a milestone of going past the 4mn customer homes mark. Sequential growth has been strong at 11.8% this quarter,” he said.
India mobile revenue growth was driven by tariff hikes in November across the prepaid segment, which propelled average revenue per user (ARPU) growth at India’s second largest telco, said analysts. They though added data usage fell as the price hikes meant some user losses, some downgrading to lower valued data plans while others cutting their mobile internet usage.
Vittal said that Airtel’s overall presence has now expanded to 672 towns and has enabled it to add 1.1 million home passes in the quarter. “We believe Fiber to the Home is a massive opportunity for us.”Vittal said that while the reforms are game changing, more needs to be done and we look forward to the next round of measures planned by the Government. “In particular, the high levies on the industry need rationalization. Equally, the reserve prices for 5G spectrum must be lowered so that it is viable for us to purchase spectrum,” he said.
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