Telcos dial up home broadband battle: Vi and Starlink join Jio, Airtel push

Jio and Airtel scale up for 100 million homes, with Vi and Starlink joining the race

India’s home broadband market is entering what sector watchers describe as a "land grab" phase, as competition between Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel intensifies each quarter, while Vodafone Idea (Vi) prepares to enter a space with an addressable market of more than 100 million homes.

 

Market leader Jio has strengthened its position as the country’s largest home broadband provider with a hybrid strategy spanning fixed wireless access (FWA), unlicensed broadband radio (UBR), and fibre. The Reliance Industries telecommunications (telecom) arm added 2.5 million home broadband subscribers in the quarter ended in December, taking its total base to 25 million.

 

Airtel, meanwhile, clocked its highest-ever quarterly net additions in the home broadband segment in the quarter ended in December, at 2 million subscribers, taking its total to a little over 13 million. The company reported sequential revenue growth of about 34 per cent, driven by a deeper fibre and FWA footprint, a stronger content push, and expansion across distribution channels, including IPTV (internet protocol television).

 

“We expect home broadband to be the next big growth opportunity for Indian telecom operators and expect subscribers to grow 2.85x to 114 million by 2029-30 (FY30) from about 40 million in 2023-24,” said Piyush Choudhary, head of Asia telecoms at HSBC. He added that 5G FWA, along with fibre home passes, would be the key contributors to expanding the total addressable market.

 

Falling equipment prices, coupled with carriers’ installation and distribution capabilities, have accelerated the pace of FWA adoption through 2024 and 2025. “We think telecom companies (telcos) in India are well placed to capture a share of household entertainment spend with their bundled home broadband plans, which come with rich content offerings. Jio and Airtel are likely to be key beneficiaries,” Choudhary said.

 

HSBC projects Jio’s market share to rise to 50 per cent by FY30 from 36 per cent in 2024-25 (FY25), while Airtel’s share may expand from 21 per cent to 26 per cent over the same period.

 

“Home broadband is currently in a land grab phase,” said analyst Kunal Vora of BNP Paribas Securities in a note. With home passes expected to lift overall revenue per user beyond upgrades from 4G to 5G, experts say the segment will continue to attract a disproportionate share of investment from all carriers.

 

Jio is betting on technology to gain market share through a combination of fibre, 5G FWA, and UBR, a strategy that has helped it expand its share by 800 basis points over the past 12 months to 41 per cent as of November 2025. FWA accounted for 75 per cent of quarterly broadband additions. Revenue from the home segment rose to ₹8,494 crore in FY25 and is expected to increase to ₹13,340 crore, according to IIFL Securities.

 

Airtel’s three-pronged home broadband strategy includes expanding fibre-to-the-home coverage to 1,500 cities and FWA footprint to 3,200 cities, while strengthening content offerings and driving growth across channels. Revenue from the home segment rose to ₹2,000 crore as of December 2025, up 33 per cent year-on-year (Y-o-Y). As of FY25, the segment contributed about 4 per cent to the company’s overall revenue.

 

Vi will be a new entrant in the FWA space, Chief Executive Officer Abhijit Kishore said during the company’s January earnings call. The country’s third-largest carrier will also explore satellite communications to expand coverage in rural and remote areas, backed by its tie-up with AST Global.

 

On the satellite front, SpaceX’s Starlink is preparing to launch operations with aggressive tariffs for home broadband services, as it looks to challenge traditional carriers.

 

“The home opportunity is expanding faster as availability, affordability and use-case issues have been addressed. Satellite broadband services are also likely to be commercially launched in India, but we do not expect any meaningful impact from them,” Vora said.

 

Global sector watchers, however, warn that memory prices have risen nearly sevenfold over the past year, potentially threatening equipment supplies required for broadband rollouts.

 

According to the February 2026 edition of Counterpoint Research’s Memory Price Tracker, dynamic random-access memory and NAND prices have surged more than 600 per cent Y-o-Y for consumer applications ranging from personal computers and low-end smartphones to routers and set-top boxes.

 

“This rings alarm bells for telcos pursuing aggressive broadband rollouts — whether fibre or FWA — in 2026. This ‘memory winter’ is likely to prolong and slow deployments as supply constraints intensify, while also pushing up procurement costs for routers, customer-premises equipment and set-top boxes,” Counterpoint analysts said in a note earlier this month.