Bharti Airtel announced on Monday it will spend 600 billion rupees (€8.5 billion) over the next three years to upgrade its fixed and mobile networks.
Project Leap, as it is called, will see India’s biggest operator double its mobile network footprint and deploy a fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network. Bharti has also pledged to extend its fibre backbone and to deploy WiFi hotspots and small cells to provide better indoor coverage.
"Our large customer base covers rural, urban, homes and enterprises and we are obsessed about delivering an exceptional experience for each one of them," said Gopal Vittal, CEO of Bharti Airtel India & South Asia, in a statement. "We are confident that this new initiative will deliver a truly differentiated customer experience and reinforce our commitment to build a future-ready network."
Under Project Leap, Bharti Airtel said it will deploy more than 160,000 base stations over the next three years, doubling its current footprint. By March 2016, the company aims to provide mobile broadband coverage to all towns in India and 250,000 villages, increasing to 500,000 villages in three years. The telco said it will also deploy 10,000 indoor coverage solutions – including WiFi hotspots and small cells – in order to improve indoor network performance.
The programme will also see Bharti Airtel upgrade its mobile infrastructure to compact, efficient single RAN base stations.
On the fixed side, Project Leap will see Bharti Airtel deploy an FTTH network; however, it did not detail a specific rollout plan. It will also upgrade its copper access network with vectoring, increasing the peak speeds on offer to 50 Mbps from 16 Mbps. The operator has also pledged to connect every SME in India to either high-speed fixed or mobile broadband networks.
To cope with the ever-increasing demand for data, Bharti Airtel said it will also extend its domestic and international fibre backbone network by 550,000 kilometres.
Furthermore, Bharti Airtel will also invest in self-organising network (SON) and software-defined networking (SDN) technology, location-based network planning tools, and new customer experience management (CEM) solutions in a bid to improve network performance and the user experience.
In additio n, Bharti Airtel has set a target of reducing the carbon footprint of its mobile network by 70% per base station over the next three years by rolling out more power efficient equipment, and by leveraging new battery technology, thereby reducing its dependency on diesel.
"We are confident that Project Leap will help Airtel build a smart and dynamic network that will significantly improve the quality of both voice and data services across the length and breadth of the country," Vittal said.
