Airtel Sees UBR as a Legitimate Opportunity to Expand

Bharti Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom operator, looks at the home broadband market to double to 100 million customers in the coming years. The home broadband segment allows telcos to tap into high-paying customers. However, the challenge for the telco is that they can’t deploy fiber in every area of the country. Thus, fiber broadband access is only in select areas, and to cover this up, the telcos launched the FWA (fixed-wireless access) services. The FWA services are also now live. However, even that’s not going to reach everywhere.

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To counter this, Jio, India’s largest telecom operator, launched the UBR services. With the UBR, Jio has been able to add new customers much faster than Airtel.

Gopal Vittal, Bharti Airtel’s CEO, at the recently held earnigns call for Q2 FY26, said, “We are currently in the process of experimenting and doing the trials on UBR. The challenge on UBR, as I mentioned in previous quarters is the interference in dense locations, because it uses the same Wi-Fi band that is used at homes, and you would see sometimes in your own home, where you have browsing problems, it really comes due to interference issues in the lower band of the Wi-Fi frequency. This is an area of trials, but I do believe that UBR has a legitimate opportunity to expand into areas, which are not so dense, so this could be remote locations, rural areas, small towns, etc., where the density of presence of fiber is low, so that is being assessed right now.”