Airtel, Vodafone May Join Forces To Fight Jio Gigafiber; TataSky Broadband Expands To 17 Cities
Will this turn out to be Mother of all Consolidations?
This can be the mother of all consolidations in the telecom space in India.
Airtel has invited Vodafone-Idea to join them, and together fight the onslaught of Jio in Indian telecom space.
Will Vodafone agree?
Meanwhile, India’s #1 DTH operator: TataSky has now expanded their broadband services into three more cities.
Airtel Invites Vodafone-Idea For Partnership
During the on-going Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Bharti Airtel Chairman and founder Sunil Mittal officially invited Vodafone for a partnership in India.
This call for partnership has been called for sharing optical fiber resources and telecom infrastructure.
Speaking with reporters in Barcelona, Sunil Mittal said, “We have given an invitation. We did that in towers, and if you remember, Indus Towers was created. On the same lines, we have asked Vodafone-Idea to come and join the fibre company.”
Mittal said that Vodafone-Idea has given a “warm reaction”.
Indus Towers is a Joint Venture company between Airtel and Vodafone for establishing and managing telecom towers. Together, they have 122,730 towers in 15 circles, achieving 288,013 tenancies, a first in the world.
It is clear that Airtel wants to save money, and stop wasting resources to fight Jio.
Mittal said, “They have a lot of fibre, we have a lot of fibre. Though we have lot of overlaps, both of us will gain about 25% capacity and new routes which we don’t have… So, you stop wasting money.”
Vodafone group CEO Nick Reads had earlier said that global telecom companies will need to “collaborate and share network”, if they want to survive and thrive together.
More details are awaited.
TataSky Broadband Expands to 17 Cities
Meanwhile TataSky Broadband has now expanded to three more Indian cities. With this,TataSky broadband is now available across 17 cities in India.
These three Indian cities where TataSky Broadband is now available are: Kolkata, Pune and Jaipur.
When they launched their broadband services last year, these 14 Indian cities were covered: Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Bhopal, Chennai, Delhi, Ghaziabad, Greater Noida, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Mira Bhayandar, Mumbai, Noida, Pimpri Chinchwad and Thane.
TataSky Broadband plans start with Rs 999, wherein users can get unlimited data at 5Mbps speed. Rs 3600 is the top-end plan, which offers 550 GB at 50 Mbps speed.
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