Excelsior Correspondent
JAMMU, Nov 30: Bharti Airtel will invest Rs 60,000 crore in the next three years to upgrade networks and improve quality of services as competition intensifies in the sector.
The company’s announcement today came against the backdrop of consumers facing problems of frequent call-drops.
As part of its ‘Project Leap’, which will entail investments of Rs 60,000 crore, Bharti Airtel said it will undertake a massive transformation of its network and will deploy over 70,000 base stations in 2015-16, making it the largest deployment in a single year since its inception.
In three years, Airtel will deploy over 1,60,000 base stations, effectively doubling its presence from what it has currently on the ground. Airtel said a majority of this investment will be used on infrastructure to improve quality of call and data services.
“Bulk of this investment will be on capital expenditure as over the last couple of auctions, we have bought a large spectrum and we are well covered in almost all circles. There are only a few pockets where we need to pick up more spectrum,” Bharti Airtel (India & South Asia) MD and CEO Gopal Vittal said here.
“The comprehensive 10 point programme under ‘Project Leap’ will enable the company to take a decisive lead in delivering a differentiated customer experience”, he said adding Airtel will expand its mobile broadband coverage to all towns and over 250,000 villages by March, and in three years, it plans to offer mobile broadband to over 500,000 villages in the country.
To improve indoor experience, the company will deploy a range of solutions including small cells, carrier aggregation solutions, wi-fi and the use of multiple technologies across different spectrum bands.
“Over a period of three years, we plan to deploy over 1,00,000 solutions through a combination of wi-fi hotspots, small cells and indoor solutions,” Vittal said.
Airtel will cumulatively deploy more than 550,000 kms of domestic and international fiber and will swap its legacy networks and base stations over a three year period and replace them with efficient technologies.
The company will also modernize its home broadband network by upgrading its copper assets through new age Vectoring Technology. This technology will enable Airtel to offer 50 Mbps speeds from its current 16 Mbps by 2016.
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