Bharti Airtel to offer only fibre broadband by shutting down copper network in a year

Indian telecom operator Bharti Airtel on Thursday stated that it will be shutting down its copper infrastructure within a year, leaving the only option to be fibre-based broadband. This move comes with an aim to offer broadband via the LCO partnership model in over 1000 cities, in contrast to the current 120 cities. Gopal Vittal, Bharti Airtel’s CEO during a meet announced that Airtel has added 1.4 million fibre home passes during the current quarter, with a scale of this rollout being at a historic high. He added that Airtel was in fact in the process of rapidly upgrading their older legacy copper assets to fibre.

He stated that he believed within a year or so, Bharti Airtel would have to shut down the company’s copper infrastructure and move to completely fibre at homes. This would be game-changing, according to Vittal.

According to Bharti Airtel, the home business segment has also seen a growth of approximately 2.3% YoY with the highest numbers ever in terms of customer additions, with over 215,000 during the quarter amassing to a total of 2.79 million customers.

Bharti Airtel’s digital services offerings also saw robust growth, with the CEO stating that MAUs increased to over 190 million across our key digital assets thanks to XStream and Wynk.

In other analytics, Vittal said that there are over 1.2 million retailers transacting per day on the Mitra App, with online recharges continuing to contribute to around 50% of overall revenues.

To add to all this, the CEO said that Bharti Airtel’s revenues and margins contracted for the Broadband sector were primarily because of the flow-through impact of pricing decisions taken by the company in the previous quarter.

He further went on to say that the company recalibrated its offerings and launched XStream bundles with content and uncapped internet so as to add to the market penetration.

The company also added that its Enterprise Business continues to add to all of its momenta with a 9.2% YoY growth, primarily due to demand for connectivity and solutions all across both global and domestic businesses. Furthermore, it is also making decent strides and expanding in areas such as Data centres, Cybersecurity, Customer relationship management platforms, video-conferencing and more. TelecomT alk