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