Bharti Airtel (Airtel), India’s largest telecommunications services provider, on Thursday said that the company doubled its mobile network deployment over the past two years in line with its objective of building a future ready network to lead India’s data growth story.
In the last two years (financial year 2015-16 and 2016-17), Airtel has deployed 1.8 lakh mobile sites across India. This is same as the number of mobile sites deployed by the company in the first 20 years of operations, making it one the largest mobile network rollouts globally, Airtel said in a statement.
In November 2015, Airtel had launched Project Leap, its nationwide network transformation programme to build a future ready network. The company has committed an investment of ₹60,000 crore over three years under this programme.
“This deployment will leverage our spectrum capacity and is yet another benchmark by Airtel in execution excellence. We are now in a position to ramp up future capacity on this network very quickly, giving us unmatched reach and agility. I want to thank our network partners for their support in this deployment,” Abhay Savargaonkar, Director- Networks, Bharti Airtel, said.
Airtel 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, the company said.