Airtel doubles mobile sites in two years

In one of the largest mobile network rollouts globally, Bharti Airtel has doubled its mobile network deployment over the past two years, with the country's largest mobile operator by subscribers deploying 1.8 lakh mobile sites across India.

The sites, deployed in FY '16 and FY '17, is same as the number of mobile sites deployed by the company during the first 20 years of operations. The rollout is in line with its objective of building a future ready network to lead India's data growth story, the company said in a statement.

In November 2015, Airtel launched 'Project Leap', its nationwide network transformation program to build a future ready network. The company has committed an investment of Rs 60,000 crore over three years under this programme.

''Airtel has been at the forefront of India's telecom growth story and this record deployment underlines our commitment to building a world-class network of the future that will serve a digital India. This deployment will leverage our spectrum capacity and is yet another benchmark by Airtel in execution excellence. We are now in a position to ramp up future capacity on this network very quickly, giving us unmatched reach and agility. I want to thank our network partners for their support in this deployment,'' Abhay Savargaonkar, Director-Networks, Bharti Airtel said.

Airtel has also doubled its overall transmission capacity and increased the mobile backhaul capacity by eight times to roll out high-speed broadband network with 4G and 3G coverage in all 22 telecom circles. This deployment has been supported by addition of 14,500 KM of fibre to Airtel's national fibre backbone along with 3666 new fibre points of presence nodes (highest ever deployed in Airtel network in single year).

Airtel said it now offers the widest network with 4G and 3G coverage across all the 22 circles in the country.