Airtel Eyeing Aggressive 4G Packs To Take On Jio

Airtel Eyeing Aggressive 4G Packs To Take On Jio

Bharti Airtel (Bharti Airtel share price trading at Rs. 320.20) has plans to approach the regulators to sort all the doubts over providing interconnection points (PoIs) to Mukesh Ambani-owned company- Jio. Gopal Vittal, the managing director, India & South Asia, at Bharti Airtel claims to have provided more PoIs to Jio than any other carriers.

Hopefully, Jio’s full-fledged price launch will happen sometime in December and Airtel too will come up with aggressive 4G bundled packs and will implement them shortly. It is indeed strenuous to compete with a free services offer hence Airtel has come up with such a step.

Vittal agreed to the fact that Jio’s free services offer had “put an element of softness” in Airtel’s data revenue growth. He anticipated the new 4G rival to grab 40 million customers by the end of December. Bharti Airtel’s data realization slipped 10 per cent sequentially in the September quarter. Y-o-Y data revenue growth of nearly 24 per cent in the quarter was its slowest so far.

The telecom operator reported a close 5 per cent on-year fall in net profit in the September quarter. Vittal further added that there was confusion at the TRAI’s end regarding the issue of providing PoIs to Jio Infocomm. Airtel’s PoI augmentation for Jio has been nothing short of staggering since the number of E1s (interconnect points) given to the company within just five weeks is 2.5 times the levels offered to any other operator in India.

Airtel would shortly go back to TRAI and telecom department to clarify any confusion on the PoI issue, and the company is confident that they will take an objective view on the matter. Some the confusion on the PoI issue, occurred from whether incumbent carriers were legally obliged to supply interconnect points to Jio from July itself when there was no clarity on the timing of the latter’s commercial launch.

Last week TRAI had imposed a combined penalty amounting to Rs 3,050 crore on Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular, charging them flouting licence norms in denying adequate interconnection points to Jio. Previously, Airtel’s Mittal had said the industry also needed to settle the issue of Jio’s free tariffs citing nothing can be free for a lifetime.

India’s three largest telcos namely Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular have sought clarifications from the regulator on whether Jio’s free voice and data offer from September 5 till the end of the year goes against norms that set a 90-day limit for promotional plans.

However, TRAI recently gave Jio a clean chit and said its tariff plans which include free voice for life is permissible and compliant with rules.

Source : https://www.dynamiclevels.com/en/blog/airtel-eyeing-aggressive-4g-packs-to-take-on-jio