In Part 1 of our interview with K Srinivas, President of Bharti Airtel's B2C business unit, which includes all its consumer business and market operations, including Mobile, Telemedia, Digital TV and emerging segments like M-commerce, M-Health, he spoke about losing money on 2G data, and about processes put in place for improving billing practices in VAS (i.e. addressing false billing and reducing unethical practices), on developer revenue shares and how Airtel was thinking about the developer ecosystem and app store integration. In Part 2, he speaks about offloading traffic to Wifi, smartphone addition, revenue sharing with web companies, data pricing, IPTV and broadband operations, among other things: MediaNama: On video, how many simultaneous streams can your network support? Srinivas: I can't answer that (laughs). At a conceptual level, we do dimension our network for the peak utilization. When you're constrained with 5MHz on 3G, you have limitations. That's where we need to create one backdrop of a packet core, where for 2G, 3G, DSL, is a common packet core, across all devices, technologies, and we have that little advantage. Is 5MHz enough to manage millions of people on 3G? Obviously not. It's a technical impossiblity. MediaNama: What's your take on offloading traffic to Wifi? Srinivas: That's something which is core to our strategy. We have started building our Wifi Hotspots. To start with, we'll have cafe's, airports, malls etc. We have over 1,000 odd hotspots, which is not enough, but it needs to get into hundreds of thousands. There is a team which is aggressively pushing that.…
Airtel
K Srinivas, President (B2C) Airtel On Offloading Data To Wifi, Smartphones, Data Pricing, Broadband
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