Bharti Airtel Launches India's Latest 3G Network

Published on: 1st Jan 1970: 1:33am

­India's Bharti Airtel - now just plain Airtel - has launched its 3G network, with coverage initially in the southern Karnataka state, whose capital is the technology hub of Bangalore. The company expects to offer 3G services in 40 cities by March across all of its 13 licensed areas, and expand the services to 1,500 cities and towns within a year.

These 13 telecom circles also constitute 68% of Airtel's revenue market share. This includes key metros such as Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad, which account for 21% of all data traffic in the country and are expected to have the strongest uptake of 3G services.

As none of the mobile networks hold 3G licenses covering all 22 of India's licensed circles, the private operators are also in talks about network sharing where they have coverage gaps. Airtel confirmed that it is engaged in the talks and said that they are at an "active closure" stage without going into details.

"We expect the ARPUs to definitely stabilize to a much greater extent than they would have been otherwise for the very simple reason that there would be an explosion in terms of new products and services on the non-voice side," Airtel's president of mobile services, Atul Mohan Bindal said at the launch. The country has seen ARPU's drop from already low rates following the surge in competition following the controversial GSM license awards in 2008 to a large number of new networks.

Airtel is the third private network to launch 3G services in India, after Reliance Communications and Tata Teleservices. The two state-owned networks, BSNL and MTNL had launched their 3G networks before the private licenses were auctioned off.

Last year, Airtel awarded 3G network rollout contracts to Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia Siemens Network. The company awarded majority of the contract to Ericsson India. On the same lines, Bharti expanded its relationship with Nokia Siemens Networks, which would manage Bharti's 3G Network in 3 circles across India. Bharti Airtel has also introduced Huawei Technologies as the 3rd partner for offering 3G services in a few circles.

On the web: Airtel 3G Portal

 

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