Airtel woos broadband users with 100 mbps offer

NEW DELHI: After getting its wireless networks equipped with technologies like carrier aggregation, India’s leading telco Bharti Airtel is now gearing up to fight the speed war on the next front, fixed wireline broadband, in a bid to ring fence its customers in the lead up to Reliance Jio Infocomm’s launch of fixed-line broadband services, likely to start next year.

Airtel has deployed Vectorization technology, a top standard for fixed broadband across Europe, to offer up to 100 Mbps of broadband speeds on its fixed broadband footprint in 87 cities. This is the first deployment in India and one of the largest deployments in the world. Airtel has selected Chinese gear maker Huawei for the upgradation of its broadband network.

The telco is currently offering up to 16 Mbps speeds depending on the location in these cities. Initially available to customers in Chennai, the upgraded service will soon be available free of cost to the entire Airtel fixed-line broadband customers in coming weeks. Airtel is offering unlimited three months trial offer to new broadband customers to quickly increase the subscriber base in these cities.

“Customers are moving from 2G speeds to 3G/4G broadband speeds now. At home, they need Wi-Fi on a wireline. Requirements for speeds go up substantially as people connect more devices on the same network, therefore it gets important to update the speed,” Ajai Puri, director-operations at Bharti Airtel, told ET. He added wireline broadband will become crucial for high-end data users, given the affordable pricing.