4G offers to soon revealed by Bharti Airtel to compete against Jio
Bharti Airtel will soon release strong 4G offers to take on the newly launched Reliance Jio Infocomm. As India’s No 1 mobile carrier fight to revitalize its slowing data revenue growth and improve penetration between the rising competitive intensity.
Confusion over Pols
Apart from this, Airtel plans to approach all its regulators to clear up any confusion over providing interconnection points to Jio because the Mukesh Ambani-owned company provided more
pols than any other telco, said Gopal Vittal, managing director, India & South Asia, at Bharti Airtel.
“It is very difficult to compete with a free service offer and all telecom companies expect Jio’s full-fledged price launch to happen sometime in December, but we will come up with some aggressive 4G bundled packs to take Jio soon,” Vittal said without sharing details.
He acknowledged the fact that Jio’s free service offer had “put an element of softness” in Airtel’s data revenue increments, adding that he had expected the new 4G rival to grab 40 million customers only by December-end.
However, Bharti Airtel’s data analyzation dipped 10% sequentially in the September quarter. Compared to recent years, receiving data revenue growth of merely 24% in the quarter was its slowest till date.
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Bharti Airtel’s suffering
Partaking in an earnings call on Wednesday, a day after the market leader reported a 5% on-year fall in net profit in the September quarter; Vittal added that there was confusion at the Trai’s end over the issue of providing PoIs to Reliance Jio. Similar view was shared by the chairman of Bharti Group Sunil Mittal earlier in the day. “Airtel’s PoI fight against Jio has been nothing short of staggering as the number of interconnect points provided to the company within five weeks is 2.5 times more than the levels offered to any other telecom operator in India,” Vittal added.
Bharti Airtel would soon go back to Trai and the telecom department to clear up all confusions on the PoI issue, adding that the company is very much confident that they will take “an objective view” on the matter.
On the confusion of this PoI issue, an industry insiders suggested, stemmed from whether incumbent carriers were legally obliged to provide interconnect points to Jio from July itself when there was no fixed date or time of the latter’s commercial launch.
Mittal and Vittal’s comments came a day after Idea Cellular MD Himanshu Kapania said that the country’s No 3 mobile carrier had not flouted any quality of service norms over provisioning interconnection points to Jio.
