Bharti Airtel slashes broadband plan prices by 30%

Bharti Airtel slashed its home broadband plans by up to 30 per cent for all new activations on Monday to rope in fresh customers.

The Airtel Surprises scheme, which is for all existing customers, offers higher speed and extra data benefits free of charge.

Earlier, customers had to pay a premium for getting higher speed on their broadband plans.

Airtel said that all its broadband customers will get a minimum speed of 2 Mbps while the upper limit is 16 Mbps.

"The company is offering free upgrade to higher available speeds at no additional cost to its existing users while new users will pay only for data consumption and it will offer the highest speed available in the area," Airtel said.

Airtel's announcement comes a few months ahead of the proposed launch of Reliance Jio Infocomm's services in the country. Airtel chief executive officer (homes) Hemanth Kumar Guruswamy admitted that there is competitive pressure in the broadband market especially from small players.

"But the latest offering is part of our innovation. People these days operate multiple devices at home and the usage of broadband at homes has drastically gone up. We are excited to offer additional benefits to all our customers across about 100 towns. This is in addition to the 24X7 free voice calling offer that we had launched recently for all our customers," he added.

Guruswamy said that with the launch of free calling, customers taking voice calling facility on broadband connection has increased to 85 per cent from 40 per cent earlier. The company has about 15.4 lakh broadband customers.