Airtel crosses 10 million subscribers mark in Punjab

The Sunil Bharti-led firm has plans to add 24,500 mobile sites by September 2018, which will help it take high speed data services to rural areas and strengthen its coverage across cities.

Airtel has already doubled its 4G network capacity in 1800 Mhz band and will also deploy 1,000 kms of additional optic fibre to serve the massive surge in high speed data consumption over smartphones, the company said in a release.

Manu Sood, Hub CEO Upper North, Bharti Airtel, said, "We would like to thank all our 10 million plus customers in the state for giving us the opportunity to serve them."

Bharti Airtel started its operations in Punjab in 2002 and it was the first operator to launch 4G services in the state.

The telco will soon roll out its VoLTE services in the state, the release said.

With close to 200 smartphone models now compatible with Airtel VoLTE, customers will soon be able to enjoy HD voice quality with faster call set up, the company said.

Over 5,800 sites were rolled out and over 850 kms optical fibre deployed across Punjab in FY 2017-18, it said.