Spectranet on Monday said it has partnered Aircel to offer high-speed Internet access to the latter's customers on Wi-Fi. The company also announced plans to invest Rs.500 crore over the next five years to expand its services across 50,000 hot-spots and reach over 50-lakh households across the country.
Spectranet, as preferred partner of Aircel, will deploy and manage core as well as access service infrastructure for Wi-Fi services enabling seamless authentication solution for both post-paid and pre-paid subscribers. This service will enable seamless Internet access for Aircel subscribers across Aircel GSM/3G network and Spectranet Wi-Fi network.
According to Spectranet Managing Director Udit Mehrotra, “We have deployed Wi-Fi network at over 1,000 hot-spots across six major cities — Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore and Hyderabad — and plan to add three more cities by this year-end. In the next five years, we will reach 40 cities…we are building India's largest Wi-Fi network across commercial and residential areas and see tremendous growth opportunity in this segment.”
Pointing out that it was the first-ever deployment of 2G and 3G mobile data offload to Wi-Fi within India, Mr. Mehrotra said: “Our Wi-Fi service can be accessed by Aircel subscribers on all kinds of Wi-Fi enabled devices, including mobile phones, laptops and tablets.
Our mobile data offload platform enables seamless traffic handover between GSM and Wi-Fi networks.
Mr. Mehrotra further said that Spectranet was building its own optical fibre network. “We have so far laid over 2,000 route km of optic cable and plan to expand it to 6,000 km. We are building our own fibre infrastructure because we believe the data requirement is only going to go up from this point. In India, not only are we looking at a rapid increase in penetration but we are also looking at a rapid increase in the usage per person or usage per household,” he added.
