Bharti Airtel said it has expanded its broadband offering under tie-ups with local cable operators to 48 cities as of the end of September, up from 18 cities three months earlier, and will scale it up even faster in coming days. It said it took seven eight months to get the model right, but the […]
The numbers released by India’s three telecom operators on their July-September performance show a remarkable trend reversal: For the first time ever, Reliance Jio was no longer the fastest growing data operator in India, losing the crown to Bharti Airtel. While Jio’s mobile data traffic went up by 220 million GBs in July-September compared to […]
Bharti Airtel, the former No.1 telecom provider of India, has doubled the pace of its 4G roll-out by adding nearly 333 new 4G base stations every day during the July-September period. That works to over 10,000 base stations per month, or almost 14 new 4G base stations per hour — including at night. In comparison, […]
GTPL Hathway, one of India’s top cable TV and cable internet providers, indicated it was not overly worried about telecom players like Bharti Airtel luring away its local cable operator partners under their new LCO partnership strategy. Bharti Airtel had announced some weeks ago that it plans to authorize local cable operators (LCOs) to resell […]
The number of new broadband subscribers added per month on Jio Fiber — the wired connectivity service from Reliance Jio — has crossed the 1 lakh mark for the first time — a year after the company started giving connections commercially. According to India’s monthly broadband addition numbers, the total number of high-speed internet users […]
Reliance Jio’s wired connectivity service, called Jio Fiber, has finally achieved what many thought was impossible — break the two-decade long declining trend in the number of wired phone connections in India. The number of wire-line connections in India started declining around two decades ago as mobile call tariffs fell sharply, spurring BSNL customers to […]
India’s communication ministry today said that there was no possibility of an operator being asked to pay the dues of another operator simply because it has entered into a spectrum sharing agreement with the other. This was clarified by Minister of State Sanjay Dhotre in reply to a question by MP K Subbarayan on whether […]
As Vodafone Idea unveils a new brand identity, the financial troubles facing the company has as thrown into question the very future of the Indian telecom operator. There has been speculation that American telco Verizon or online retail giant Amazon may infuse money into the operator, but such rumors have been quashed by the Indian […]
When Mukesh Ambani announced the tariff plans of Reliance Jio Fiber a year ago, most of the people who were eagerly waiting for the commercial services to launch were disappointed as there was nothing special about the company’s tariff card. However, its rivals were relieved, because their fears about a mega disruption in the market […]
Reliance Jio, which started wired broadband operations in September last year, has started speeding up the roll-out of its Jio Fiber service after an initial slow-down. The company started the service with around 8 lakh connections as of October end, most of which were converts from its trial service. Over the next two months, it […]
Bharti Airtel, which announced a program to partner with cable operators after Reliance Jio acquired Den and Hathway, said it has cracked the best model for the partnership and is planning to rapidly expand the program in the next 6-12 months. Airtel announced its cable operator collaborative program in late 2018, and has been trying […]
Despite the extreme disruption caused by the COVID-19, Bharti Airtel reported a decent set of numbers for the Apr-Jun period, though the pandemic clearly slowed down the growth of Airtel’s 4G service and exerted pressure on realizations. PANDEMIC FREEZE While the company has been reporting strong increases in the number of 4G users in recent […]
Notwithstanding the looming threat from Reliance Jio, private equity-funded ACT Fibernet has emerged as the fastest growing wired broadband player in India in recent months. For the first three months of 2020, the company added nine times as many fiber broadband subscribers as Reliance Jio and nearly twice as many as Bharti Airtel. Reliance Jio, […]
Global telecom equipment provider Nokia today said its VoLTE service on Bharti Airtel’s Indian mobile network now supports 110 million users, or about 32% of the company’s total subscriber base. With this, said the Finland-based telecom gear maker, Bharti Airtel’s network has become its Nokia’s biggest VoLTE deployment anywhere in the world. It also makes […]
Bharti Airtel has become the first major DTH or cable company to free up its content app, Airtel XStream, from its hardware. All other major cable and DTH companies in India offer their app only on their own device — typically a stick or a set-top-box — and do not allow the software to be […]
When Reliance Jio increased its data tariff by 25% in December last year, it had hoped for a boost to its revenue and profit numbers. Instead, the move seems to have helped its rivals more, with Bharti Airtel overtaking Jio in terms of data consumption growth for the first time. For the first time since […]
Bharti Airtel said it has made its e-book application — available to anyone — free on a temporary basis to help those who are spending time at home as part of the Coronavirus lockdown. “Readers can now access thousands of top books and novels on Juggernaut Books (formerly known as Airtel Books) for FREE by […]
Reliance Jio, the country’s largest telecom operator by size, said attempts to increase telecom tariffs have failed due to competitive actions by rivals, and asked TRAI to intervene to raise data prices. Traditionally, it is Jio’s rivals such as Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea which make such allegations. Responding to a TRAI consultation paper on […]
Vodafone Idea, one of India’s biggest telecom operators, today said that the dues that it has to pay pursuant to a recent Supreme Court decision works out to Rs 21,533 cr. This is about 60% less than the Rs 53,000 cr that Department of Telecom has calculated. “Following the approval of the Board of Directors […]
Vodafone Idea, an operator that is struggling to stay afloat, seems to have finally decided to abandon its long-held strategy of allowing Reliance Jio to undercut it on prices and lure away its customers. For the last four years, Vodafone and Idea always allowed Jio to price its offerings lower, thus helping the Mukesh Ambani […]
