"If you take Bangalore and Chennai, in the first 10 days, we had over 1.5 lakh customers. The daily consumption of data on day seven crossed 1 terabyte per day," Atul Bindal, President- Mobile Services for Bharti Airtel, told MediaNama. "To put things into perspective, that is an extremely high percentage of the total 2G data consumption, that we had not just in those two cities, but across the country. It's almost as if the pipelines were clogged, and as the diameter of the pipe goes up, the flow increased. And this was happening when we hadn't really launched our dongles. Today, as we speak, we have well over 500,000 customers, and data consumption coming in at a very brisk pace." Bharti Airtel today launched 3G Mobile services in the National Capital Region, across Delhi, Gurgaon, Faridabad and Noida, targeting over 1800 3G cell sites for its 76 lakh customers in the region. The company has so far Airtel has launched 3G services in Bengaluru, Chennai, Coimbatore, Mysore, Manipal, Udipi and Jaipur, with half a million customers on 3G with 4500 cell sites. Airtel is targeting 40 cities by the end of this month, and 1000 cities by the same time next year. Bindal told MediaNama that the company could have announced a 20 city launch in October 2010, because the equipment was in place, but chose to take its time, to ensure density of deployment. "I know there are operators launching 500-600 cell sites or even lesser than that,…
