Bharti Airtel has announced it will invest Rs 60000 crore over a period of 3 years in order to upgrade and expand its voice and data quality in India. The telecom operator plans to deploy the funds under a new Project Leap program to fuel a transformation of its network.
Gopal Vittal, MD and CEO of Bharti Airtel, asserted that the majority of the Rs 60000 crore will be used for building infrastructure to improve voice services as the player has already bought most of the spectrum it requires. The company is further working towards making 60% of its network across the country ready for mobile broadband by March 2016.
Airtel plans to spend approximately $2.2 billion (about Rs 14677 crore) within the current financial year up to March 2016. It will set up 70000 base stations across India within this period of time and plans to build 160000 in total within 3 years. If successful, the operator would double its presence in the nation.
India is currently the 2nd-biggest mobile phone market by number of customers in the world. Airtel is the largest telecom player here. As per NDTV, it plans to modernize its wired broadband service as well. It boasts of over 3 million customers in the subcontinent. Changes include updating its copper assets with vectoring technology.
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This will allow Airtel to provide speeds up to 50Mbps by next year. Further preparations are underway to use optical fiber cables in homes to offer speeds running up to a maximum of 100Mbps. Gopal Vittal believes these initiatives under Project Leap will help the telecom brand to build a world-class smart network which will significantly help improve voice and data services.