Bharti Airtel expects to complete 5G rollout in urban areas and some key rural pockets this year and expects the investment in networks to hover around Rs 28,500 crore, a senior official of the company said on Wednesday. Bharti Airtel Managing Director Gopal Vittal during the company's earning call said that the company's decision to not bid for premium 700 megahertz band spectrum and go for non-standalone 5G network is leading to better coverage at lower cost. "We are already in 3,500 cities and towns out of around 7,000 cities. we will conclude urban coverage this year and some of the key rural pockets," Vittal said. He said that the company has stopped making capacity expansion in 4G network as the company is seeing traffic offload of up to 30 per cent in areas where 5G has been launched. "I think the quarter's capex of Rs 9,000 crore is little elevated, but if you take two full years, the capex is about Rs 28,500 crores for the full year. As I mentioned before, if you take a ..
Return on capital employed is low at 8.5 per cent, and the net debt: Ebitda is at 2.9x, consolidated
Says pricing however remains a challenge with India having the lowest rates for data packs on per GB basis in the world
Strong 4G and postpaid subscriber additions along with healthy FCF generation were the key highlights in Q4.
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Airtel also recommended a final dividend of Rs 4 per share of face value Rs 5 each
CLOSING BELL: The BSE Midcap, Smallcap indices, however, bucked the trend and ended with a gain of up to 0.2 per cent. Breadth too was marginally positive.
At the bourses, shares of Bharti Airtel have declined 1.86 per cent so far this calendar year (CY23), as against 2 per cent rise in the S&P BSE Sensex
Over 2 million wireless subscribers exited Vodafone Idea in February; Reliance Jio gained 1 million, and Airtel added 982,554 subscribers
Telecom operators Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel added 19.8 lakh mobile subscribers month-on-month in February, even as Vodafone Idea lost 20 lakh customers, according to data released by Trai on Thursday. India's largest telecom player Reliance Jio added the maximum number of mobile subscribers at about 10 lakh, taking its wireless subscriber tally to 42.71 crore users in February, as against 42.61 crore in January. Sunil Mittal-led Bharti Airtel gained 9.82 lakh mobile users during February and ended the month with a wireless subscriber base of 36.98 crore. Vodafone Idea lost 20 lakh subscribers in the wireless category as its mobile subscriber base shrunk to 23.79 crore, as per data from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai). "...the total Broadband Subscribers increased from 839.18 million at the end of January-23 to 839.33 million at the end of February-23 with a monthly growth rate of 0.02 per cent," the release said. The top five service providers constituted 98.
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Merging operations with Dialog is expected to give Airtel access to a larger user base in island nation
Airtel would accordingly be issued new shares in Dialog upon completion of the transaction
The partnership will enable US enterprises interested in expanding to India and Africa to leverage Airtel's digital infrastructure solution
For easy transition from 4G to 5G, Airtel has tuned all the current Airtel 4G SIMS to be 5G compatible
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Telecom operator Bharti Airtel on Monday announced its partnership with Secure Meters for deploying Narrow Band-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) services to power 1.3 million homes in Bihar via a smart meter solution. The telco said this deployment will be India's first NB-IoT solution on a narrow band with a fall-back option that will work on 2G and 4G, and ensure real-time connectivity and uninterrupted transfer of critical data. NB-IoT is a low-power, wide area, radio network technology which enables a wide variety of IoT devices and services, including smart meters. Airtel's NB-IoT platform is future-ready and is scalable to 5G, the telco said in a release. Ajay Chitkara, Director and CEO of Airtel Business, informed that IoT is one of the fastest-growing business segments for Airtel Business. "This venture into NB-IoT strengthens our credentials as the largest cellular IoT player in the country and places us firmly as a partner of choice for Discoms looking to invest in smart mete
Near-term overhang of 5G related capex and subscriber churn should be watched by investors, they said
Initial reports showed widespread problems with call drops, poor audio connectivity from 5G users
Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel are going neck-to-neck in rolling out 5G services. Currently, they offer 5G services in around 500 cities and towns in the country