Vodafone India and Idea Cellular are gearing up for their merger completion, which is expected to be done by March 31, 2018. The merged entity will become India's leading telecom operator and to keep up the name, Vodafone and Idea are reportedly planning to invest Rs 60,000 crore in infrastructure to meet the demand for data in the country. Both the companies are expecting that data usage in the country will grow by six-fold and reach 120 petabytes in the next three years, up from the current 20 petabytes now. India is currently the world' second largest telecom market and first in terms of data usage.
“The merged entity will invest about Rs 60,000 crore over a period of three years to ramp up its infrastructure to meet data demand, which will help it achieve expansion and vertical growth,” said a person to Livemint.
Also, both the companies are forced to invest more to upgrade the infrastructure and that too at a time where the industry is witnessing a serious revenue and profit stress. The merger will come into play, which is expected to be completed by March 31.
“Overlapping of the spectrum will be reversed, and with large spectrum chunks at disposal, rolling out faster data will be possible,” said the person to the publication. It is also expected that the companies will be expanding their capacity by six-seven times of the current capacity, which will provide high-speed data at 200-300 Mbps.
Leading telecom operator, Bharti Airtel is also said to be investing up to Rs 60,000 crore on infrastructure expansion under Project Leap. Already, Airtel is in the process of upgrading the network in various parts of the country. Reliance Jio has already invested a whopping s 1.5 trillion for setting the telecom infrastructure required to provide world-class services.
Also, Livemint approached both Vodafone and Idea Cellular in this regard, but Vodafone denied to comment, while Idea did not respond to the query.
