As the wireless telecom market went into consolidation for last 5-7 years, we can see only 4 operators in the market, i.e. Jio, Airtel, Vodafone Idea and BSNL (MTNL-BSNL merger is announced two days back).
Frankly speaking Jio is ahead of all, thanks to its backhaul assests which will also fuel its broadband dream as well as upcoming 5G venture in long run.
Jio's tower arm, as it was spun off from main company as Jio Infratel in March 2019, is announced to be acquired by Canada's Brookfield Infrastructure Partners L.P. and its affiliates in multiphases. With 45000 towers from Reliance Communications, and another 125000 towers made by Jio itself, the total number of Jio towers reaches 1,70,000; which mades Jio Infratel as largest tower company beating Indus Towers. However 25% of them are monopoles. (India's tower companies in detail )
Jio's fiber arm, Jio Digital Fiber holds a extraordinary 3,00,000+ km of fiber optic cable laid across the country. Apart from this, Jio has controlling stakes in DEN Networks, Hathway Cable & Datacom, and GTPL via different Reliance group of companies like Jio Futuristic Digital Holdings, Jio Digital Distribution Holdings, Jio Television Distribution Holdings, Jio Content Distribution Holdings, Jio Internet Distribution Holdings, Jio Cable and Broadband Holdings, Reliance Ventures, Reliance Strategic Investments, and Network18 Media & Investments. Via these MSO, Jio has further deep penetration for fiber to home.
In a recent analyst call (source Dslindia) Jio clears that their investment cycle is over, and they are pretty much ahead of peers. If Jio stops expanding network & passive infra assets, Airtel will take another 3 years and VIL 8 years at their current pace of expansion.
As per latest data, Jio's 65% of towers are using fiber backhaul, where as Airtel stands at 30% and Vodafone Idea at 18%. Without fiber backhaul, the stand of 5G in India is very very weak as 5G will be delivered on 3.5GHz band most probably, which means operators need to create a dense network to unleash best of 5G in the unplanned cities of the country, which without fiber backhaul nearly impossible. As Ciena explains, 'When you are building a 10-lane high speed expressway, a narrow stretch of a two-lane road anywhere in the middle would certainly become a huge bottleneck.'
CRISIL published a report in June, 2019, where it strongly said that 5G would dictate more than 70% of fiber backhaul for best services. And building up a nation wide fiber optical network is not a joke, as Higher land cost and Right of Way (RoW) approvals make fiberisation cost per km as high as ₹1 crore per km in metros.
Globally carriers are hiving off passive infra assets (tower and fiber) into seperate entity, as this business model helps them to better monetize the asset by offering services to third parties, reduce capex requirements and to create better valuation of the spun off unit.
Vodafone Idea did a demerger of fiber unit and created a wholly owned subsidiary, Vodafone Tower Ltd. (VTL). As announced on October 16th, 2019, VTL has a ~235,000 kms of fibre optic cables laid across the country (source Aditya Birla).
Firefly WiFi in Airports:
Cluster A (13 airports – Chennai, Goa, Pune, Trivandrum, Calicut, Coimbatore, Indore, Mangalore, Trichy, Vishakhpatnam, Vadodara and Madurai).
Cluster B (8 airports – Kolkata, Lucknow, Guwahati, Bagdogra, Agartala, Imphal, Bhubaneswar and Ranchi.)
Created back in 2015 to counteract Jio's public WiFi Jionet, Firefly now operates across ~20 states, more than 40 cities and all leading public Wi-Fi segments, and won ''Best Wi-Fi Start-up 2017" This little known company may have a big role to play during 5G roll out as initial 5G deployment will be densely located in Cat A circles or in certain pockets of Metro circles.
No comments:
Post a Comment