CHENNAI : Sunil Mittal-led Bharti Airtel will invest heavily to expand data and mobile network footprint in rural and semi-urban areas across Tamil Nadu. The telecom major said it is planning to roll out an additional 12,000 mobile sites across Tamil Nadu in the financial year 2018-2019 to add network capacity and penetrate high-speed data into rural areas.
With this planned rollout, the number of Airtel’s mobile sites across Tamil Nadu will go up by 30 per cent to a total of 52,000 mobile sites in the state, the company said in a statement.
“As part of Project Leap, our network transformation initiative, we will continue to channel investments towards building a world-class future-ready network that touches every citizen of the state.
“These investments underline our strong commitment to Tamil Nadu and will contribute to the Government’s vision of building a digitally enabled state,” said Manoj Murali, CEO of Airtel’s
Tamil Nadu and Kerala operations.
The company also said that it plans to bring about an additional 3,000 kms of optic fibre across Tamil Nadu to bring its total fibre footprint to 17,000 kms across the state. Tamil Nadu has a total subscriber base of 413.29 million and the second-highest monthly subscriber growth rate of 7.2 per cent as of March
2018, according to Telecom Regulatory Authority of India data. Airtel has been growing its subscriber base steadily in the state to a total of 24.07 million as of March 2018 from 21 million in the past three months.