According to industry sources, Bharti Airtel has plans to invest Rs 270-280 billion in telecom network with a focus on 5G rollout. However, while the company is planning to increase capital expenditure (capex) by 10-15 per cent, it currently has no plans to charge a premium rate for 5G services as it has not worked in several countries that tried to do so.
The company earlier had an annual average capex in the range of Rs 240-250 billion. The capex is being largely spent on radios (mobile antennas), fibre, broadband, enterprise technology data centres, etc. Meanwhile, as per the data shared by the Ministry of Communications , Airtel has rolled out 3,293 base stations for 5G as of November 26, 2022. The operator hopes mobile services rates to go up but the range of increase will depend on market dynamics.
Further, Airtel is also looking at increasing revenue from new business verticals around cloud services, cyber security, communications platform-as-a-service, etc. which it estimates to be a Rs 500 billion market.
