Airtel expands its Wi-Fi service across India

[Bapun]

Airtel CEO Gopal Vittal recently reached out to the company's customers with exciting news. In his letter, Vittal announced that Airtel now offers high-speed Wi-Fi services in more than 1200 cities across India, an expansion aimed at meeting the growing demand for reliable internet at home.

Airtel rolls out high-speed Wi-Fi to over 1200 cities with enhanced value - Times of India

Spotlight News: Airtel CEO Gopal Vittal recently reached out to the company's customers with exciting news.

timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Airtel expands its Wi-Fi service across an additional 4.1 million households in Gujarat

Airtel expands its Wi-Fi service across an additional 1.9 million households in Telangana

 

[Bapun]

Bihar:

Uttar Pradesh:

West Bengal:

 

[Bapun]

Karnataka:

Maharashtra:

Gujarat:

 

[Bapun]

Madhya Pradesh:

Andhra Pradesh:

 

[Esmail]

Airtel should call it fiber broadband instead of WiFi. Coz when they say rolls out WiFi service it seems like public WiFi hotspots like you have at airports.

 

[Ashok Varma]

I'm confused, expecting Airtel's wifi on streets, high density public areas. Home wifi called as Airtel xstream fiber

 

[Yash1]

Is it their in Charkop?

Maharashtra:

 

[mmadhankumar]

I believe this reference to fiber broadband as wifi and then the removal of airfiber page on their website and a single integrated form for new connection are all just marketing strategy to up sell Airfiber ahead of wired FTTH. I am not predicting/imagining but just connecting the dots. They are taking cue from Jio in this regard. But of course a wrong approach IMHO. Now expect them to provide you airfiber even when you want to install the wired FTTH.

Future conversation be like..
Customer: sir I want Airtel WiFi
Airtel: *brings the AF equipments*
Customer: sir what is this
Airtel: You asked for "WIFI"
Customer: but....
Airtel: shut up. this is Airtel WIFI.

 

[Rushil]

Well said, @mmadhankumar bro. I don't know why Airtel or Jio are doing this. There is no comparison between Airfiber and traditional fiber broadband. In all terms, traditional fiber broadband is superior to Airfiber. Instead of improving existing broadband services like other countries, introducing new routers, and new plans like 2 Gbps or 4 Gbps with normalized existing plans, increased speeds, and much higher data caps or the removal of data caps, they are doing these crap things to troublesome the customers.

 

[Esmail]

Well said, @mmadhankumar bro. I don't know why Airtel or Jio are doing this. There is no comparison between Airfiber and traditional fiber broadband. In all terms, traditional fiber broadband is superior to Airfiber. Instead of improving existing broadband services like other countries, introducing new routers, and new plans like 2 Gbps or 4 Gbps with normalized existing plans, increased speeds, and much higher data caps or the removal of data caps, they are doing these crap things to troublesome the customers.

Well there are 2 reasons for that.

1) Air fiber can be installed practically anywhere in a city or town where 5G network is available, it doesn't depend on whether the operator gets right of way to lay the underground fiber in a particular locality or the permission to wire a building in a society. Similar to the benefit of DTH over local cable lines.

2) Operators have plenty of 5G spectrum with no developed use case for monetization. Mobile subscribers wouldn't pay a higher price for the same quota of 5G data over 4G since mobile use cases are serviceable by 4G speed just fine. Other use cases which need low latency connectivity like smart homes or smart automobiles are in nascent stage. So the only high bandwidth use case which can be used to monetize the 5G network is the Fixed wireless (Air fiber) connection.