Bharti Airtel plans to spend ₹24,000–26,000 crore on capex this year across all major sectors, including mobile network sites, digitising network, fibre roll out and capacity building on information technology.
Last year, the company invested around ₹23,000 crore, said its Chief Operating Officer Ajay Puri.
“It is an exciting time from the telecom perspective. We are in the midst of a journey to build a Digital Airtel, which is Airtel 3.0 that includes digital content, digital platform and digital services. We are also in the midst of hyper competition and consolidation in the market, and we have managed to sustain our leadership position,” he told newspersons.
The market is consolidating, and has provided opportunity to expand both nationally and in Tamil Nadu. That’s the reason Airtel is investing in digital content, digital experience and starting to work on future technologies like Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence. Airtel was first to test on 5G, he said.
Airtel will also take its fibre footprint in the State to 17,000 km in the next three years with the roll out of 3,000 km of new optical fibre.
Mobile sites
In 2018-19, Airtel will roll out 12,000 mobile sites across Tamil Nadu to add large network capacity and take high speed data services deeper into rural areas. This will translate into 32 new Airtel mobile sites going live every day across the State, which will add to a superior network experience for customers, he said.
On Fibre-To-Home, Puri said Airtel plans to roll out to another 10 million homes in the next two years and give customers speeds of 300 mbps to 1 gigabyte per second. The existing base is 8-9 million, he said.
In Tamil Nadu, Airtel continues to lead the market with a share of 32 per cent with over 22 million customers. It has the largest network in the State with mobile broadband covering 95 per cent of the population.
Airtel mobile services are present in 41,000 villages and over 1,100 cities and towns across Tamil Nadu, he said. “Nearly 50 per cent of all Aircel port-outs across Tamil Nadu came to Airtel,” he added.