Ratings agency CRISIL has downgraded certain debt securities of Vodafone Idea Ltd by one notch, quoting conditions in the Indian telecom market. It downgraded Rs 6,000 cr worth of non-convertible debentures issued by Vodafone from AA- to A+. The highest rating in the scheme is...
INDIAN TELECOM
Vodafone Idea to eliminate 16,000 distributors, shut 2,000 showrooms
Vodafone Idea, the company formed out of the merger of the former No.2 and No.3 telecom operators in India, said it will eliminate around 16,000 distributors, close over 2,000 branded stores in urban areas and slash the number of call centers by more than half....
Vodafone Idea to shut down 88,000 sites, save Rs 490 cr per year
Vodafone Idea will shut down nearly 88,000 cell sites (tenancies) as part of the company’s network optimization drive, the company’s chief technical officer Vishant Vora told analysts in Mumbai yesterday. Vodfone Idea had sent out notices to shut down 66,000 towers in the first week...
Bharti Airtel overtakes Vodafone Idea in mobile broadband
Bharti Airtel overtook the combined Vodafone-Idea entity in mobile broadband users in August due to a steep, 20% fall in Vodafone India’s wireless broadband users in the month. The sharp decline of 12.5 mln mobile broadband users on Vodafone’s network in August was at odds...
Airtel ends ‘lifetime free incoming’; to charge Rs 35/month
Bharti Airtel said it has stopped the policy of allowing users to continue on its network even if they spend nothing on outgoing calls and use their numbers only for receiving incoming calls. The company said it has done this by removing many of its...
As Jiophone sales rise, Bharti Airtel’s mobile revenue starts falling again
The pain for Bharti Airtel’s mobile business does not seem to be over, with the company’s India mobile revenue declining further in the September to a new low, belying expectations that it had hit bottom two quarters ago. Total India mobile revenue fell 2.2% on...
Jio GigaFiber: Mukesh Ambani resolves to replicate 4G success in broadband
Mukesh Ambani, the billionaire who changed the face of telecom in India in the last two years, said he has set his eyes on replicating his success in wireless telecom in the sphere of wired telecom as well. He said the 4G services launched by...
Reliance Jio thunders through estimates, doubles data traffic in 1 yr
Reliance Jio, India’s largest telecom operator, has seen its data traffic double to 2.6 billion GBs per month this September from 1.3 billion GBs a year ago, according to the company’s quarterly update. Surprisingly, the 100% growth in data consumption has outpaced the 83% jump...
Bharti Airtel hopes for a 50% increase in 4G spends by consumers
Bharti Airtel, India’s second largest telecom company by revenue, said it sees a “massive opportunity” for growth in India, its key market, due to the exit of all but four players. “A 3+1 player industry is a great outcome,” it said at the CLSA Investors Forum...
Miscalculated the impact of unlimited plans – Idea CEO
Outgoing Idea Cellular CEO Himanshu Kapania admitted today that his company understimated the impact that unlimited plans would have on the company’s finances. Reacting to concerns about Idea Cellular’s failure to keep up with the revenue growth of Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio in the...
No more price cuts, says Bharti Airtel
Bharti Airtel said it expects prices in India’s telecom sector to start climbing again in around six months or so, and indicated it has no stomach for further price competition with newcomer Reliance Jio. The comments by company officials come a few months after Reliance...
Kerala tops smartphone penetration in India; Gujarat, Punjab close behind
Kerala has emerged as the state with the highest smartphone penetration in the country, according to data released by CyberMedia Research, a market intelligence firm tracking the technology sector. CMR’s data also reveales that on a pan-India level, about 47% of the mobile phone users...
BSNL could launch 5G within one year
Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd could end up launching 5G services as early as the first half of 2019, going by comments made by a senior official at an industry forum today. Speaking at the Mobile Device Summit 2018 organized by ‘The Mobile Association’, Anil Jain, the company’s...
Bharti Airtel’s 4G capacity to see massive increase this year in Mumbai
Bharti Airtel has announced a massive expansion program for its Mumbai 4G network that could increase the data carrying capacity by several times in one year. The expansion comprises four areas — increasing the number of cell sites by about 30%, increasing the 4G spectrum...
Idea cuts employee costs by 40% in 3 months, improves margin in Jan-Mar
Idea Cellular slashed its employee costs by nearly 40% in the three months from January to March this year, and also reduced several other items of expenditure in a successful attempt to protect its margins from the impact of falling revenue. As a result of...
Bharti Infratel loses 22,134 tenancies in FY18, but Q4 revenue rises 4%
Bharti Infratel, the telecom tower company from the Bharti group, reported a modest 4% growth in sales and 2% improvement in net profit due to a loss of tenancies as well as increasing fuel costs. The company’s revenue rose 4.2% on year to Rs 1,673...
BSNL on track to post biggest ever subscriber losses in FY18
India’s state-owned telecom utility Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd is likely to report a decline of around 1.66 mln landline phone users in the year-ended March 2018, the highest in its history. During the first ten months of the just-concluded financial year, the company saw a...
Reliance Jio’s 49 plan revives interest in Jiophone – Credit Suisse
Financial services firm Credit Suisse said sales of Jiophone, which had begun to lose steam after an initial surge, are now back on track due to the affordable Rs 49 plan launched by Reliance Jio. Jiophone, priced at Rs 1,500, is estimated to be selling...
Reliance Jio overtakes Bharti Airtel as India’s largest telecom network
Newly launched telecom operator Reliance Jio has overtaken market leader Bharti Airtel as the company with the largest telecom network in India. As of March 1, Reliance Jio had 4.48 lakh telecom base stations (towers) in India, compared to 4.31 lakh base stations for Bharti...
Telecom Commission okays Rs 7,330 cr follow-up to BSNL’s Maoist tower project
The Telecom Commission, the top bureaucratic decision making body within the communications ministry, has approved a Rs 7,330 cr project to set up an additional 4,072 mobile towers in left-wing extremism affected areas, telecom minister Manoj Sinha said today. The project will be a follow-up...