Lord of 4G?

By Nandita Singh

Bharti Airtel has consolidated its position for the ‘Battle for 4G Subscribers’ set to be played out this year. Barely three months into 2016, the company has announced the acquisition of Videocon 4G airwaves in six circles. This extends Bharti’s 4G play to 700 MHz of 3G/4G spectrum across India, which is higher than the new entrant RJio’s holding of 640MHz spread across 22 circles.

With ‘harmonized spectrum bank’ in place in 19 circles, and a Rs 60,000 crore ‘project leap’ detailing investments until 2018 underway, Bharti’s transformational upgradation is on at top speed, and is evident in the 4G rollouts the company has clocked in a record time. Project leap announced in November 2015 promised 11,500 additional high speed data sites by March 2016.

With the playing field more or less evened out, key determinants will be the quality and range of service to consumers. Enterprise or otherwise, consumer needs are dynamic and shifting, and being in sync with the evolving consumer needs on a continuous basis is a tough one to crack. Detailed consumer profiling and the consumer-base management is the hold grail here, however, innovative technology deployments leading to consumer insights and intelligence is easier said than done.

Bharti has a number of entertainment services on offer under its brand Wynk. RJio slated for commercial service launch has a more integrated offering combined with ease of use. RJio is clearly launching itself as a digital service provider – its LYF branded handsets come bundled with entertainment and ecommerce. Being a new player RJio’s advantages are many, and so are the consumer expectations from RJio.

Bharti is expected to fend-off competition with strategies related to subscriber churn and focus on untapped markets and perhaps tightly integrating regional languages factoring in India market realities across demographics. Besides, more market consolidation will follow. Among the incumbents the other two from the Top 3 club -- Idea Cellular and Vodafone have also moved on aggressively to 4G deployments but could find the market tough and lose subscribers to churn or the new entrant RJio.

The other major incumbent BSNL, which has an unparalleled reach in India and also reported profits under the leadership of Anupam Shrivastava could well see revival with its service innovation on wireline and wireless.

Given its early mover advantage, Bharti Airtel is the current ‘Lord of 4G’, and in 2016 it will continue to reign. For how soon the landscape can change after RJio commercial launch, watch out for report on ‘Year of 4G’ in the next issue of Voice&Data.

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