industry

Airtel sees higher traffic growth in suburban & rural areas than urban


New Delhi: Bharti Airtel is seeing higher traffic growth in suburban and rural areas than in urban, mainly due to large-scale migration, but its networks are largely stable after an initial traffic surge when the nationwide lockdown was clamped, the company said.

Airtel said there may not be any need to invoke intra-circle roaming (ICR) pacts with other telcos. “Traffic has increased but it is now more stable or new normal… it is stable for the last week.

It is well spread traffic than peaky traffic in busy hours,” Randeep Sekhon, chief technology officer at Bharti Airtel, told ETin a telephonic interview. “We saw mass migration, which probably has spread our traffic across India.

Increased traffic is being seen in rural India compared to urban. We are now in a new normal,” he added. Airtel has been optimising network at the backend and adding capacity remotely to handle the traffic surge.

It has made improvements at radio, core and transport levels for its nation-wide network. “We had tested ICR agreements, but we don’t see a need to invoke it right now because we don’t see networks going down or big networks choking,” Sekhon said.

“We are ready with the system if need be; I am in touch with counterparts.” He said Airtel is “very well equipped” to support rural regions, having shut down its 3G network, which helped with more capacity to support the traffic increase across India.

“Rural is generally less utilised compared to urban.” Video streaming services like Netflix, Amazon, Hotstar, YouTube reduced bitrates and switched off HD services in India to reduce load on wireless networks. “This helps telcos to manage traffic and users to manage the quota. It’s a win-win … Now, people are able to watch more videos without running out of quota,” Sekhon said.





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