Bharti Airtel said that it will shutdown down its copper infrastructure in a year’s time and will just offer Fiber-to-the Home in the country. It is also aiming to offer broadband through the LCO partnership model in over 1000 cities, up from 120 cities currently.
Gopal Vittal, Bharti Airtel’s CEO during a meet announced that Airtel has added 1.4 million fiber home passes during the current quarter, with a scale of this roll-out being at a historic high. He added that Airtel was in fact in the process of rapidly upgrading their older legacy copper assets to fiber.
“The Broadband category is clearly seeing very strong adoption and I believe the next few years will be the time for scaling this business as the need for high speed broadband explodes. We continue to focus on our core strategy of Expansion and Experience in this business,” Gopal Vittal, Airtel CEO said during the earnings call.
He further went on to say that the company re-calibrated its offerings and launched XStream bundles with content and uncapped internet so as to add to the market penetration.
Airtel said that its Enterprise Business continues to accelerate its momentum with 9.2% YoY growth, driven by demand for connectivity and solutions across global business and domestic businesses.
The company said that it continued to expand and grow adjacent verticals such as Data centers, Cloud, Cyber security, Customer relationship management platforms, video-conferencing amongst others.
Digital TV witnessed a growth of 5.8% YoY on an underlying basis, on the back of strong customer additions of 485,000 during the quarter. (Source: ETTelecom)
