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Bharti Airtel on Tuesday said the company will continue to focus on the rural markets for 4G network, for which the coverage has grown from 87 per cent to 96 per cent in the last 10 years, and added that it will continue to invest more in the coming year.
“In the last 10 years we have moved our population under coverage from about 87 per cent to 96. Yet we believe there is still head room for expansion and growth. We are now seeing over 40 per cent of industry 4G net adds coming from rural areas and believe the time is right to bridge a substantial part of the coverage gap in mobile against the leading player in the industry,” Gopal Vittal, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer – India and South Asia, said at an earnings’ call post announcement of quarterly results.
He said the company is using its data science models to determine exactly where to go. “With the sub-Ghz footprint we now have, this will provide customers with a very good proposition thereby fuelling our growth,” he said.
On 5G, Vittal said as the network starts getting built it will see a significant part of its existing data traffic on 4G move to Airtel 5G plus.
“This is important since it will allow us to gradually move more and more spectrum to 5G at the flick of a button. We have also started testing the SA (standalone) mode on 5G. This mode may be relevant for some enterprise use cases. While these use cases are very niche today, we are already doing our trials to serve customers where needed,” he said.
Airtel is also testing its mm wave spectrum for fixed wireless access (FWA) and the company will announce the plans on FWA in the coming months.
On investment, Vittal said the company will decide in the next nine months for 5G when it is building the network.
“The following year is the year where we will roll out both 5G as well as rural ..our capex is moderately around ₹23,000-24,000 crore every year. There could be some advancement of capex from the following year (2024-25), but we will keep it very simple and see how the uptake is, we will watch the space in rural,” he added.
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