Bharti Airtel has adopted several measures as part of the transformation of its telecom networks to improve customer experience of its mobile subscribers.
Airtel is investing in advanced mobile data networks to tap the growth potential in video driven data consumption.
Airtel’s network strategy team
India CEO Gopal Vittal
COO Ajai Puri
CTO Abhay Savargaonkar
Chief Architect Campbell Mcclean
Head Operations & Deployment – Network Dushyant Kumar
Head – Network Sourcing Ranjan Sharma
Mobile CTO Shyam Mardikar
CIO Harmeen Mehta
Airtel does not have a leadership position in the Indian 4G market ever since Jio started offering free services as part of its promotion campaign. Airtel does not share 4G related data. Jio has more than 72 million subscribers – many are on free offers.
India’s 4G subscriber base is forecast to grow from 3 million in 2015 to 280 million by 2020, according to GSMA India. The latest TRAI report indicates that India had only less than 100 million 4G subscribers in 2016.
India’s data traffic is expected to grow by a CAGR of 63 percent over the period 2015 – 2020. This means telecom operators such as Bharti Airtel need to make investment in networks.
Churn increased
Airtel had 273.6 million mobile subscribers including 42.7 million mobile data customers till March-end.
Despite investment, the churn has increased from 3.4 percent in the previous year to 3.7 percent in the current year – mainly due to tough market conditions and competitive pressure from Reliance Jio. Airtel claims that the churn percentage is still the lowest amongst all operators.
The above chart is about mobile subscriber growth at Airtel
Data revenues, as a percentage of total revenues, increased from 21.8 percent to 23.2 percent in the current year. The total MBs on the network has increased 47.3 percent to 733.1 billion MBs.
Revenue increased
Airtel revenues increased 0.9 percent to Rs 565,511 million. Airtel EBITDA margin improved from 39.1 percent to 40.3 percent. EBIT margin declined to 18.7 percent from 22.9 percent in the last year, primarily due to incremental amortisation cost on new spectrum acquired and incremental depreciation on deployed Capex. Incremental amortisation cost on new spectrum acquired in India has an impact of 3.1 percent on EBIT margin.
Airtel network
Airtel had 162,046 network towers, compared to 154,097 network towers in the last year. Airtel added 72,663 mobile broadband base stations during the last fiscal to improve its data network business. In fact, the number of mobile stations added by Airtel was 136,479 in last two years.
As part of Airtel’s Project Leap investment program, which will see Rs 60,000 Capex in 3 years, Airtel deployed 180,000 mobile sites across India in 2015-16 and 2016-17.
The above is about tele-density in India.
The telecom operator’s focus was on building mobile broadband sites. It also invested in optical fiber for powerful future ready internet backbone. The team executed the infrastructure project involving radio and transport planning, installation, fiber / MW availability, media readiness.
Airtel has made investment in Self Optimization Network in 16 cities and Geo-analytical tools real time in 22 cities, customer experience based optimization of its mobile broadband network. These platforms have enabled automatic optimization of multi-layered networks, reducing drop calls, network blocking, and increasing data throughputs for setting new benchmarks in end user experience.
As part of the Open Network initiative, Airtel improvised its current network infrastructure and planned for new sites.
Airtel deployed 90,000 sites including 8,000 swap sites. With more than 35,000 km of incremental fiber rolled out last year, Airtel now has more than 550,000 km of domestic and international fiber creating a powerful backbone for data and internet services in additional to voice. This helped Airtel launch 3G and 4G across all 22 circles in India with 4G TD & FD in 18 circles.
Airtel launched platinum 3G on 900 MHz spectrum in Mumbai, Kolkata, NESA, Karnataka and Punjab circles. Airtel was the first company to launch 3G (2100Mhz + 2100Mhz) dual carrier implementation achieving a speed of 42 Mbps in DL, RJ, BH, TNC & JK.
Airtel was the first company to do Carrier aggregation (FD+TD) with commercial device (Samsung Note-5) achieving a speed of 135 Mbps and now its present 450 towns.
Airtel tested LAA Carrier aggregation (40MHz (LTE-U 5GHz) + 5MHz (LTE 1800)), achieving a speed of more than 250 Mbps. This technology adoption helped Airtel to manage the spectrum efficiently and provide best network experience to customers.
Airtel deployed Self Optimization Network (SON) in 16 cities enabling automation of network optimization to ensure availability of resources as per user demand. SON has enabled dynamic configuration of the network for seamless handovers in 3G and 2G network, reducing the drop calls and improving efficiency of the available spectrum and network capacity.
Airtel, which is focusing on innovation, has pioneered customer demand centric network planning and densification by getting visibility of the network consumption on granular 50m x 50m grid. It has helped in ensuring deployment of new sites, small cells in areas of high consumption, improving efficiency of the new deployments.
