Airtel to reduce spectrum auction budget for two years, says MD Gopal Vittal

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₹1,000 a month on telecom expenses," said Vittal. Airtel had 40 million home passes and was rolling out 1.5 million home passes every quarter, he added. While overall tariffs should rise, the carrier will not charge more for 5G, said Vittal.

The No. 2 carrier launched 5G services in October 2022 and has over 50 million customers. 5G services are priced at the same levels as 4G.

“Tariffs are very low in India, both the average revenue per user as well as rate per GB. If you plot both on two axes, then we are right at the bottom on both ... The question is not whether it will happen but when it will happen.

We’ve seen two rounds of tariff increase since the launch of Reliance Jio, and we hope it will happen again at some stage, not in the distant future." More applications have to be on 5G since the use case has so far been only higher speeds, and monetisation use cases for 5G are yet to be developed in India and globally, he said. “Except for some private 5G networks, and specific B2B (business-to-business) use cases, which have modest revenue streams associated with it, the fundamental use cases for 5G are still not there." Bharti Airtel reported a 38% drop in net profit to ₹1,341 crore for the quarter ended 30 September, from a year ago, dragged by one-time tax and interest provisioning of ₹1,619 crore following a Supreme Court ruling that telcos could not treat licence fee as an expense. Vittal said the calculations were done by the company and verified by auditors.