CHENNAI: The battle for India’s fast growing and lucrative telecom market revolves as much around who can build new infrastructure faster as attracting customers to these networks.
Telecom major Airtel on Thursday stated that as part of its ‘Project Leap’, a Rs 60,000 crore transformation program, it has rolled out a record 180,000 mobile sites in the last two years alone, a two-fold jump.
“This is the same as total sites deployed in the first 20 years of operations,” it pointed out. According to the company, this network expansion and deployment will help it to leverage its robust spectrum portfolio and create capacity to lead India’s data growth story.
In November 2015, Airtel had launched Project Leap, its nationwide network transformation program to make its infrastructure future-ready, to deal with constant streams of data at high speed. The budget for this expansion, also taken to improve Quality of Service amid recurrent call drops, was Rs 60,000 crore over three years.
Two years into the program, Airtel announced on Thursday that it has also doubled its overall transmission capacity and increased the mobile backhaul capacity by eight times to roll out high speed broadband network with 4G and 3G coverage in all 22 telecom circles.
This deployment has been supported by an addition of 14,500 km of fibre to Airtel’s national fibre backbone along with 3666 new fibre POP nodes.
“We are now in a position to ramp up future capacity on this network very quickly, giving us unmatched reach and agility,” said Abhay Savargaonkar,Director - Networks, Bharti Airtel.