airtel-4g-lte

Airtel Optimizing 4G VoLTE Network, lags Jio in Coverage

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We went through the Bharti Airtel’s Annual Report and here are the key takeaways. Bharti Telecom’s Airtel managed to increase wireless capacity by 35% with tower count increase of just 11%, suggesting that the rest came from re-farming 2G spectrum to 4G and from other capacity augmentation techniques such as beam-splitting. Airtel is still expanding the tower count, whereas Jio, which has relatively 30% more towers, is closer to the maximum feasible count indicating 4G coverage, subscribers and revenue market share of Jio being ahead of Airtel.

Bharti ran a special programme with its network vendors, to increase spectral efficiency by up to 5% in all circles. It deployed 280 Massive MIMO sites in FY21, well below Vi’s 1,700. It appears that Airtel is less reliant on massive MIMO as a capacity

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Airtel gets Serious on 4G / Home Broadband after Jio OnSlaught

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Bharti Airtel’s operating performance improved progressively through the quarter. Smartphone sales (slowdown impacted 4G adoption) are now back to pre-Covid levels. Local and district-level lockdowns continues to cause minor disruptions. However, the management is not seeing any further erosion in its customer base.

Management said that the current tariffs are still at low levels. They have guided for ARPUs to move to Rs200 in the short term and Rs300 in the medium term. Besides tariff hikes, ARPU increase will also be driven by increase in share of 4G subscribers (better mix). Management did not comment on the exact timing for tariff increase. Secondly, the company believes that the current data allowances are way too generous and price architecture needs to

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Bharti Airtel Bids for Videocon’s 4G LTE 1800 Band Spectrum

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Airtel 4G LTE Spectrum Bid on VideoconSunil Mittal led Bharti Airtel announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire right to use 2X5 MHz spectrum in the 1800 MHz 4G LTE band from Videocon. This deal, if concluded, will mark Videocon’s exit from the telecom market. This deal happened amidst the cancellation of earlier sale of Videocon’s spectrum to Idea Cellular. The acquired spectrum in all six circles (valid until December 18, 2032) is contiguous in nature and can be used to offer LTE data services. The acquisition will further strengthen Airtel’s 4G LTE footprint, with LTE (both FDD and TDD) spectrum covering 93% of its overall revenue or 19 out of a total 22 circles.

Airtel will acquire Videocon’s spectrum (2X5 MHz in the 1800 MHz band) in six circles namely Bihar, Gujarat, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh,

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How Vodafone and Airtel are vulnerable to Jio’s Public launch ?

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Vodafone IndiaAkash Ambai led Reliance Jio Infocomm is all set for public launch within the next couple of months. Before we dive into the details on how and why Airtel / Vodafone are the most vulnerable operators let us quickly look into data with ears on the ground.

Jio will launch with about 75,000 Cell Tower Locations and about 20,000 Small Sites / WiFi Spots. Target Locations of Launch – Metro Cities, Urban Centers and Semi-Urban Towns. Rural is excluded in the initial public launch and there are no Jio 4G signals in rural areas.

With such a Network Arrangement, Jio’s addressable market is 400 Mn Wireless Consumers in the above said geographical areas. How are these consumers stacked up ?

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Airtel to Increase ARPU amidst Reliance Jio Launch

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Airtel Vs Reliance JioBharti Airtel expects modest annual increases in blended ARPU in coming years led by data (assuming rationality on the part of Reliance Jio). Airtel admits voice ARPUs will continue to dip but does not think cannibalization of voice by high-speed data is a risk, likely underestimating this voice ARPU reduction risk. Airtel thinks that higher ARPU subs (post-paid or high-end pre-paid who would be early 4G adopters) hardly churn and that pricing per se is not a factor in churn at the high-end. Additionally, it is rapidly rolling out 4G on a large scale not giving its high-end 3G/4G subs reason to shift to competition. Data traffic will continue to grow at a robust pace driven by increases in penetration and per sub consumption growth. Better data network and newer technologies (such as 4G) itself allows higher consumption on a like-for-like basis.

Plain Vanilla 2G Voice
On the contrary, incrementally new subs are coming from low-ARPU rural areas, total voice ARPU will likely continue to trend down. Urban wireless penetration

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Reliance Jio’s Contrarian Approach to Airtel – Adopts Asset Heavy Model

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Contrary to the current trend, Reliance Jio prefers an asset-heavy model. The basic premise is that assets created at a large scale and competitive capital cost provides a long-term competitive advantage through business cycles. Cost-leadership is the core mantra of Reliance Group – this is achieved via capacity creation at a massive scale. For the telecom sector, spectrum and technology are viewed as the two factors of production – the former is scarce and finite whereas technology costs tend to decrease exponentially. So Jio would tradeoff in favour of cheaper spectrum with nascent ecosystem compared to a technology with good current ecosystem.

At launch we estimate Jio to have

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Mobile Network Quality & 3G Data Helping Incumbents

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Airtel 3G NetworkAirtel’s overall voice market share is a better way to analyze the impact of smaller players’ lower tariff strategy on incumbents’ market share (given it is an incumbents across all the circles). The data shows that Airtel has managed to hold on to its share (~30%) despite smaller players’ pricing minutes at a discount (for example, Telenor’s voice RPM is 20% lower v/s Bharti/Idea, adjusting for their ILD/NLD/roaming revenue). Telenor has a 6.5% revenue share in its six circles and managed to gain ~170bps in the last nine quarters. Even Idea has gained ~220bps in 14 of its newer circles despite overall good execution. These 14 circles contribute 60% of the industry revenues and Idea currently has ~10% revenue share in them.

3G volume pick-up has helped incumbents’

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4G LTE Progress – Reliance Jio vs Airtel

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Airtel 4GIndia’s leading Integrated Telco, Airtel is doing the right thing by launching services before competition kicks in and trying to get users on its 4G network to maintain market share. However, Reliance Jio’s entry will increase the competitive intensity, putting pressure on data tariffs.

Reliance Jio Infocomm commercial launch will be around December 2015 as we had predicted, covering 80% of India’s population. Offerings will include voice, high-speed broadband, digital commerce, media and payment services. Over the last few months, Airtel has been ramping up

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Net Neutrality and Where do We Stand in the Debate ?

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In the Global Telecom industry the most debated topic is Net Neutrality. Wikipedia defines net neutrality as the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or mode of communication.

Telcos argument is wireless players should be allowed to (1) control the quality of service (QoS) of different data services (to ensure optimal experience for all users on the network) and/or (2) charge differentially for various data services to capture their fair share of the value being created by mobile data explosion. Quite understandably, the OTT players are on the other side of the

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How Reliance Jio / Airtel will Delpoy 4G Network Using FDD-LTE(1800MHz) & TD-LTE(2300MHz) ?

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Airtel Reliance Jio 4G LTEReliance Jio Infocomm’s primary focus is 4G LTE and FTTH services. Pre auction, the biggest concern was Reliance Jio’s foray into telecoms and especially 900 MHz spectrum and 2G voice market. Reliance Jio has spent Rs111bn acquiring 1800 MHz spectrum of an average 5.6 MHz pair band across 14 circles in contiguous block. This will enable it to provide FDD LTE services along with TDD in 2300 MHz, including voice to non-RJIL networks. Likewise, Airtel has already rolled out 4G LTE Services in the 2300MHz band with CSFB Technology.

Our discussions with various Network Engineers

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