Airtel Wakes up to Reliance Jio’s Challenge – Announces Project Leap

Bharti Airtel’s Sr. Management Team has finally woken up to the challenge posed by a $10 Bn startup called Reliance Jio Infocomm. Under the vision of Mukesh Ambani, Reliance Jio started as a Greenfield Telecom operator and has rolled out enviable Infrastructure if we believe in this presentation of Mr. Tareq Amin. A must watch if you are in the Telecom Sector to get a glimpse of what Jio will unveil 27 days from now 🙂

Key features of Airtel’s Project Leap are as follows,

60% of Airtel’s network will be mobile broadband enabled by the end of FY16. The company will deploy 70,000 BTS in FY16 and 160,000 in the next three years. It had a 195,000 BTS at the end of March 2015 of which 49,000 BTS were 3G. It will expand mobile‐broadband coverage to all towns and to 500,000+ villages in India.

Heterogeneous Data Play – The focus will be indoor coverage, as most data consumption happens at static locations. Airtel will deploy a range of solutions (such as carrier aggregation) using multiple technologies across spectrum bands. Over the next three years it will deploy over 100,000 solutions through a combination of Wi‐Fi hotspots, small cells, and indoor solutions.

Strengthen Optical Backhaul It will deploy more than 550,000km of domestic and international fibre to cater to fast‐growing data demands. Back‐haul infrastructure is one of the most critical components for superior quality of data services and global experience indicates that back‐haul expenses (which include intra‐city and inter‐city fibre‐optic coverage) are one of the biggest components of capital expenditure.

Wired Broadband – Airtel will modernise its 3mn home‐broadband network by upgrading its copper assets through vectoring technology [just VDSL not even GFast or VPlus Broadband], which will enable it to offer speeds of 50Mbps from current 16Mbps by 2016. It will also use domestic infrastructure to deploy a range of solutions to connect millions of SMEs across the country. We’d have least expected Airtel to upgrade existing copper, a massive FTTH rollout for Homes in Tier 1 and Tier 2 Cities, but guess we are all disappointed. Nonetheless, competition is good for Consumers and the development of the eco-system.