Telecom operator Bharti Airtel said US-based payments processor Mastercard will invest $100 mln (Rs 730 cr) into its Africa mobile payments business. The announcement comes two weeks after TPG Group invested $200 mn in Airtel Money Africa. The latest agreement values Airtel Africa’s mobile money business at $2.65bn on a cash and debt free basis, […]
Kerala Cable TV Operators’ Association, the biggest organization of local cable operators in Kerala, will inaugurate its much-awaited voice calling service on Thursday, March 25. This will make it possibly the first cable TV operators’ association in the entire country to diversify into voice services. It was one of the first to branch out into […]
Telecom operator Bharti Airtel has raised $1.25 billion (Rs 9,050 cr) via dollar-denominated bonds from a clutch of international investors, tying up funds ahead of impending auctions of 5G spectrum. The debt was raised at considerably low interest rates, though they carry the risk of the US currency appreciating in value against the Indian rupee. […]
Bharti Airtel has announced its entry into the lucrative, Rs 30,000 cr digital advertising market in India, making it the most serious competitor yet to Google and Facebook, which together control about 90% of the market at present. While Google leverages its access to search data and Facebook taps its access to behavioral data on […]
In a further commitment to rolling out Open RAN technologies, telecom operator Bharti Airtel announced a tie-up with hardware and chipset provider Qualcomm Inc. It said Qualcomm will provide technology to support the roll-out of 5G using the open technology. Qualcomm is a maker of semiconductors or chips that are used by other equipment makers, […]
Vodafone Idea, which is struggling to stave off bankruptcy after a Supreme Court bench heaped billions of dollars of extra liability on the company last year, indicated that it was not planning to sit out the 5G game. The company is currently racing to tie up funds to keep its business afloat as it lost […]
Bharti Airtel, which has so far maintained that it will take two to three years for the 5G ecosystem to get ready in India, seemed to have had a change of heart, going by its latest statement on the upcoming wireless communication standard. Giving details of the ‘first ever successful demonstration’ of 5G on a […]
Reliance Jio, India’s largest telecom company, reported a new low in net subscriber additions during the Oct-Dec period, managing to add just about 4.4 million net new users during the final three months of the year. This is the lowest net addition for any three-month period since the company started commercial operations four years ago. […]
Five months after first losing its crown as India’s No.1 operator to upstart Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel has again taken the top spot, aided by three back-to-back months of strong subscriber additions and slowing expansion on Jio’s side. As of October 2020, Bharti Airtel once again recorded the highest number of active mobile users in […]
A move away from traditional equipment vendors such as Ericsson and Huawei by telecom operators could open up a multi-billion dollar market for the likes of Tech Mahindra, Wipro, HCL Technologies, TCS and Infosys. Traditionally, telecom operators like Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea have almost completely outsourced the construction and management of their networks to […]
Bharti Infratel, the tower company spun out of Bharti Airtel, said it will change its name and ticker to Indus Tower on Friday, Dec 18. The name and stock ticker will come into effect on India’s major stock exchanges, including the NSE, on that day. The new ticker will be INDUSTOWER. The merger, originally designed […]
Reliance Jio, whose entry into wireless telecom decimated the competition, seems to be all set to repeat its performance in the wired broadband space. The company added a whopping 3.03 lakh wired connections and 2.7 lakh fiber broadband connections in the month of September. Before this, the record for the highest number of wired broadband […]
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 […]
