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The impending launch of fourth generation mobile networks next year is forcing fixed line broadband players to bump up their speeds.
Bharti Airtel has taken the lead in upgrading all its wire line broadband subscribers across 14 top cities to a minimum speed of 2Mbps.
Airtel has about 1.4 million wireline broadband subscribers of which 85 per cent is in these 14 cities. In the other 80 cities where Bharti offers the service, consumers will get a minimum speed of 1 Mbps. All the upgrades are being done in phases and will be completed by January-end.
Speaking to Business Line , Mr K. Srinivas, President, Consumer Business, Airtel, said, “The TRAI has suggested that operators should offer minimum speeds of 2Mbps by 2015. We are taking the lead in this direction by doing this right now.” Airtel has named the project as ‘Falcon' to denote the speed.
The 14 cities are Delhi, NCR, Lucknow, Chandigarh, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Coimbatore, Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Indore, Bhopal and Kolkata. Consumers will have to pay between Rs 50 and Rs 100 for the upgrade. In other markets where customers are being upgraded to 1Mbps speed, Airtel is not levying any additional charge for now.
According to Mr Srinivas, the move to upgrade speeds has been put on a fast track because of the higher speeds being offered on the wireless platforms. Wireline network is considered to be superior when it comes to offering data services and hence operators with optic fibre cable infrastructure are looking to create the differentiation by staying a level higher in terms of speeds.
Mobile operators with their 3G networks are now offering about 1 Mbps speed on an average, which sometimes goes up to 2 Mbps. But next year major players like Reliance Industries will launch its 4G based networks capable of providing speeds of nearly 10 Mbps.
As speeds go higher, data usage is also increasing. According to Airtel, customers on an average use about 13 GB of data every month which is more than double of what it was 18 months ago.
Airtel has, therefore, launched Smartbytes, which is a range of additional data usage packs to choose from 1GB for Rs 99 to 50GB for Rs 1499. Airtel provides alerts via SMS, email to its Broadband customers when they reach 80 per cent and then 100 per cent of their high speed data transfer limits. Customers can opt for their Smartbytes pack of choice anytime after they have reached 80 per cent of their high speed data limit.
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