Airtel shifts from Copper to fiber broadband says, Gopal Vittal

Bharti Airtel has announced its decision to shut down its copper infrastructure in a year's time and will just offer Fiber-to-the Home in the country. It is also aiming to offer broadband through the LCO partnership model in over 1000 cities, up from 120 cities currently.

The home business segment witnessed a revenue growth of 2.3% YoY with highest ever customer additions of over 215,000 during the quarter to reach a total base of 2.79 million.

"The Broadband category is clearly seeing very strong adoption and I believe the next few years will be the time for scaling this business as the need for high speed broadband explodes. We continue to focus on our core strategy of Expansion and Experience in this business," Gopal Vittal, Airtel CEO said during the earnings call. Vittal said that Airtel added 1.4 million Fiber home passes during the quarter –a scale of roll out that is now at a historic high. "In fact, we are also in the process of rapidly upgrading our legacy Copper assets completely to Fiber. I believe that in a year or so we will shut down our Copper infrastructure and only have Fiber to the home. This is a game changing move that will dramatically raise our experience."

He said that it is making steady progress on bundling of convergence across services. "As a result, we added 215K customers in the quarter, a level of growth that has been the highest since we started this business."

Airtel's revenues and margins contracted for the broadband business, primarily due to the flow through impact of pricing decisions taken in the last quarter. "We re-calibrated our offering and launched Xstream bundles with content and unlimited internet to accelerate penetration."

Reliance Jio said that its FTTH services under JioFiber witnessed increased uptake during the quarter on the back of unique offering and widespread network across the country. It, however, didn't share a total subscriber base. "In a short period of time, Jio FTTH services have become the lifeline for millions of customers," Jio recently said in a statement.

Airtel said that its Enterprise Business continues to accelerate its momentum with 9.2% YoY growth, driven by demand for connectivity and solutions across global business and domestic businesses.

The company said that it continued to expand and grow adjacent verticals such as Data centres, Cloud, Cyber security, Customer relationship management platforms, video-conferencing amongst others.

Digital TV witnessed a growth of 5.8% YoY on an underlying basis, on the back of strong customer additions of 485,000 during the quarter.

"In fact, one of the highlights of this business is its competitive and consistent performance. We believe we have stripped all other players in terms of revenue growth. We also believe that on a like to like basis we are now clearly the Number 2 player in the DTH industry," Vittal said.

The Digital services offerings of Airtel continue to see robust growth. "MAUs increased to over 190 Mn across our key digital assets – Thanks, Wynk, Xstream."

There are over 1.2 million retailers transacting and making payments every day on Mitra App. Online recharges continue to contribute around 50% of overall revenues.