Bharti Airtel Limited, commonly known as Airtel, is an Indian multinational telecommunications services company headquartered in New Delhi, India. It operates in 20 countries across South Asia, Africa, and the Channel Islands. Airtel has a GSM network in all countries in which it operates, providing 2G, 3G and 4G services depending upon the country of operation. Airtel is the world's third largest mobile telecommunications company by subscribers, with over 275 million subscribers across 20 countries as of July 2013. It is the largest cellular service provider in India, with 192.22 million subscribers as of August 2013. Airtel is the Second largest Asia-Pacific mobile operator by subscriber base, behind China Mobile.
Airtel is the largest provider of mobile telephony and second largest provider of fixed telephony in India, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services. It offers its telecom services under the "airtel" brand, and is headed by Sunil Bharti Mittal. Bharti Airtel is the first Indian telecom service provider to achieve Cisco Gold Certification. It also acts as a carrier for national and international long distance communication services. The company has a submarine cable landing station at Chennai, which connects the submarine cable connecting Chennai and Singapore.
Bharti Airtel added 5.10 lakh subscribers to take its base to 20.97 crore at the end of July,2014. Its market share in India is highest with a value of 28.41%.
Airtel is credited with pioneering the business strategy of outsourcing all of its business operations except marketing, sales and finance and building the 'minutes factory' model of low cost and high volumes. The strategy has since been copied by several operators. Its network—base stations, microwave links, etc.—is maintained by Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Network whereas IT support is provided by IBM, and transmission towers are maintained by another company (Bharti Infratel Ltd. in India). Ericsson agreed for the first time to be paid by the minute for installation and maintenance of their equipment rather than being paid up front, which allowed Airtel to provide low call rates of INR1/minute (US$0.02/minute).
Sunil Bharti Mittal founded the Bharti Group. In 1983, Mittal was in an agreement with Germany's Siemens to manufacture push-button telephone models for the Indian market. In 1986, Mittal incorporated Bharti Telecom Limited (BTL), and his company became the first in India to offer push-button telephones, establishing the basis of Bharti Enterprises. By the early 1990s, Sunil Mittal had also launched the country's first fax machines and its first cordless telephones. In 1992, Mittal won a bid to build a cellular phone network in Delhi. In 1995, Mittal incorporated the cellular operations as Bharti Tele-Ventures and launched service in Delhi. In 1996, cellular service was extended to Himachal Pradesh. In 1999, Bharti Enterprises acquired control of JT Holdings, and extended cellular operations to Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. In 2000, Bharti acquired control of Skycell Communications, in Chennai. In 2001, the company acquired control of Spice Cell in Calcutta. Bharti Enterprises went public in 2002, and the company was listed on Bombay Stock Exchange and National Stock Exchange of India. In 2003, the cellular phone operations were rebranded under the single Airtel brand. In 2004, Bharti acquired control of Hexacom and entered Rajasthan. In 2005, Bharti extended its network to Andaman and Nicobar. This expansion allowed it to offer voice services all across India. In 2009, Airtel launched its first international mobile network in Sri Lanka. In 2010, Airtel acquired the African operations of the Kuwait-based Zain Telecom. In March 2012, Airtel launched a mobile operation in Rwanda.
Airtel Centre, Gurgaon
Airtel launched "Hello Tunes", a Caller ring back tone service (CRBT), in July 2004 becoming to the first operator in India to do so. The Airtel theme song, composed by A.R. Rahman, was the most popular tune on that year.
During the 2009–10 financial year, Bharti negotiated for its strategic partner Alcatel-Lucent to manage the network infrastructure for the tele-media business. On 31 May 2012, Bharti Airtel awarded the three-year contract to Alcatel-Lucent for setting up an Internet Protocol access network (mobile backhaul) across the country. This would help consumers access internet at faster speed and high quality internet browsing on mobile handsets.
In May 2013, Bharti Infotel paid Rs 50,000 as compensation to a customer "for unfair trade practices". The customer alleged that the company continued to aggressively demand payment despite customer requests for disconnection of service.
Airtel is the one of the largest mobile operator in the world in terms of subscriber base and has a commercial presence in 20 countries and the Channel Islands.
Its area of operations include:
The Indian Subcontinent:
· Airtel Bangladesh, in Bangladesh
· Airtel, in India
· Airtel Sri Lanka, in Sri Lanka
· Airtel Africa, which operates in 17 African countries:
· Burkina Faso, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.
· The British Crown Dependency islands of Jersey and Guernsey, under the brand name Airtel-Vodafone, through an agreement with Vodafone.
Source: Wikipedia.
