Airtel Prioritises Home Broadband Growth Over Smart Home Adjacent Services

Bharti Airtel has decided to slow down its foray into smart home adjacencies, such as home surveillance and security, as it sharpens its focus on scaling its core home broadband business. Speaking during the Q4 FY2025 earnings call, Gopal Vittal, Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Bharti Airtel, said the company’s earlier efforts in home security, including advanced camera systems bundled with broadband, had met with only modest success.

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Airtel had launched the home surveillance offering (Airtel Xsafe) two years ago, featuring state-of-the-art cameras with 360-degree swivel, cloud storage, motion tracking, and smartphone alerts. The initiative managed to onboard around half a million customers, who have proved to be highly sticky. However, the service remained a niche, low-ARPU segment that demanded significant internal resources.

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Niche Market with High Effort and Low Returns

“We have seen some modest success, and one of the things that we found was that it was a very niche business. While the people who we did onboard, which was potentially about half a million customers, were very sticky customers, but the fact is that it was very low ARPU and a huge amount of effort that was taken within the company. So, we have decided to actually go a little slow on that side of the adjacencies and the reason we are going a little slow is that at this point in time, our single minded dedicated focus is to capture a disproportionate share of home broadband. I believe there will be enough time as India evolves, as incomes rise, for us to get into more and more services and adjacencies around that,” Vittal said.