Q3 Results: Bharti Airtel seen ahead of Reliance Jio in growth

Bharti Airtel is expected to report the highest revenue growth of all three Indian telecom companies when they announce their numbers for the October-December period, starting later today. This is despite the fact that Reliance Jio would have added several times more new subscribers that Airtel during the period. Broadly, industry observers believe that Bharti […]

Brickwork Ratings says telecom reforms not enough

Brickwork Ratings, a credit rating agency that gives advice on the ability of companies to service their debt, has hailed the slew of measures announced by the government yesterday to give relief to the telecom sector, but added they’re not enough to save the industry. FLIP FLOP The most import measure announced yesterday was a […]

Vodafone Idea hopeful of justice in AGR case

Vodafone Idea is hoping that it will be able to do a better job of convincing Supreme Court of India to allow the government to rectify the mathematical and compilation that crept into the calculation of its humongous regulatory levies that now threaten its very existence. A Supreme Court bench headed by Arun Mishra had […]

Bharti Airtel to push prices higher, targets ₹200 ARPU

Bharti Airtel, which this month increased its minimum monthly recharge price from Rs 49 to Rs 79, said it plans to continue with the price increases, targeting to take the average amount paid a single customer from Rs 146 to Rs 200 over the next six months. From this month, the company increased its minimum […]

Vodafone Idea denies reports on fiber asset sale

Vodafone Idea today said it is not considering any proposal to sell its fiber optic assets, data centers and You Broadband for $1 billion, as reported by Economic Times newspaper. However, responding to a different media report on the sale of its datacenter business and assets, it said these were not material enough for their […]

Vodafone Idea CEO says daily data plans make no sense

Vodafone Idea CEO Ravinder Takkar has urged competitors Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio to gradually move away from daily data plans, and said such plans made ‘no sense’ as consumers don’t use data uniformly. Daily data or unlimited plans were introduced by Reliance Jio as part of its Welcome Offer when it launched its services […]

Bharti Airtel restructures: Digital comes in, telecom goes out

Telecom operator Bharti Airtel seems to have borrowed a leaf from rival Reliance Jio in announcing a restructuring of its business that puts its digital business at center stage, while moving the pipe or connectivity business to a separate, wholly owned subsidiary. This is the opposite of how things stand now. At present, the connectivity […]

High tariffs hit Reliance Jio’s 4G growth

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. […]

As Jio slows, Airtel becomes India’s No.1 mobile operator again

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 […]

Airtel overtakes Jio in 4G subscriber & traffic growth

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 […]

Jio need not pay RCom’s AGR dues under sharing rules:DoT

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 […]

Does VODAFONE IDEA have a FUTURE?

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 […]

COVID-19 lockdown proves a blessing for DTH providers

The Direct to Home (DTH) satellite broadcasting service has emerged as perhaps the only segment that has seen a clear benefit from the COVID-19 lock-down, with all three listed players seeing an increase in their customer revenue during the lock-down. The biggest jump in revenue was reported by Airtel Digital, which saw its revenue jump […]

Vodafone Idea loses 63.53 lakh subscribers in March

Vodafone Idea lost a whopping 63.53 lakh (6.35 million) subscribers in March — one of the highest ever monthly shrinkage of its user base. March 2020 also saw Bharti Airtel lose 12.62 lakh subscribers. During the month, Reliance Jio added 46.88 lakh users, which is comparatively lower than the numbers that the company had been […]

Vodafone Idea kicks off cost optimization plan 2.0

Having reached the cost-saving target of its merger one year ahead of schedule, Vodafone Idea said it has now kicked off another cost-reduction plan. PLAN 1.0 The company said it reduced its operating expenses during the January-March period by around Rs 2,100 cr compared to before the merger, which works out to savings of Rs […]

One-third of Airtel users on VoLTE network – Nokia

Global telecom equipment provider Nokia today said its VoLTE service on Bharti Airtel’s Indian mobile network now supports 110 million users, or about 32% of the company’s total subscriber base. With this, said the Finland-based telecom gear maker, Bharti Airtel’s network has become its Nokia’s biggest VoLTE deployment anywhere in the world. It also makes […]

Reliance Jio hikes data price by removing data-only plan

Data costs on Reliance Jio network have gone up again as the operator has withdrawn its only data-only data and has made it mandatory for all consumers to also activate a voice pack to consume data services. The only data-only plan it had on offer — Jio Cricket Pack — used to give 2 GB […]

COVID-19: Youtube, Hotstar, Netflix etc to stop HD streaming

Several video-on-demand services in India, including Youtube, Hotstar, Tiktok, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Zee5, have decided to suspend the streaming of high-definition content as long as the Coronavirus lockdown is in place. They will continue to offer HD content on wired broadband, such as fiber and copper networks. The move is to prevent the […]