Airtel's Project Leap unveils new strategy

Telecom giant to invest Rs 60,000 cr

With an aim to improve network quality, Bharti Airtel on Monday announced an investment of Rs 60,000 crore over the next three years. This investment is over and above the Rs 1,60,000 crore it has already deployed in its active and passive network, spectrum, fibre, submarine cables, and systems till date.

Announcing Bharti Airtel’s new initiatives, Gopal Vittal, MD and CEO of Bharti Airtel (India and South Asia), on Monday said the mobile services provider is launching a network transformation programme called ‘Project Leap.’

“Airtel will deploy over 70,000 base stations in the financial year 2015-16, and we will expand our mobile broadband coverage to all towns and over 2,50,000 villages by March 2016,” he said.

Under this programme, Airtel plans to offer mobile broadband to over five lakh villages across the country. Airtel will deploy more than 5,50,000 km of domestic and international fibre in order to drive down latency, improve customer experience, and serve growing demand of data services.

Talking about Airtel’s plans to swap its networks and base stations over a three-year period and replace them with more compact and efficient technologies, Vittal said all these modern base stations will use a single radio access network to manage multiple spectrum brands. Under Project Leap, Airtel will modernise its over three million home broadband network by upgrading its copper assets through new age vectoring technology. “This will help us to offer 50 Mbps speed from our current 16 Mbps by 2016,” he said. One of our 10 point programmes under the Project Leap is to reduce carbon footprint, he added.

Airtel will reduce its carbon footprint by up to 70 per cent on per unit basis in the next three years. “Under this programme, we will be launching an information portal where every customer can monitor the progress of Leap in his/her locality, and all these happen in real-time basis,” said Vittal.

Earlier, speaking about call drops, Vittal said we have seen some improvement in quality of network in the recent past. “There are locations and localities that we still struggle, and we are working on it,” he said. Airtel has over 226 million customers and 55 per cent of them are from rural areas.