Airtel crosses 3 mn customer mark in K'taka

Bangalore, Sep 5: Marking a significant milestone in its operations in Karnataka, Bharti Airtel, India's leading mobile service provider, today announced that it's subscriber base had crossed the three million mark in the state, covering 62 per cent of its population, the highest for any operator in the country.

Briefing mediapersons here, Bharti Airtel Joint President (Mobility) Sanjay Kapoor said with the mobile market witnessing a boom, Airtel would be spending 1.8 billion dollars during the current financial year for capacity enhancement. A good chunk would be going to improvement of services, he added.

The network, which had its presence in 23 circles in the country, had been growing rapidly in the last one year and added 500,000 customers in the state in the last three months.

Out of every two mobile phone customers, one belonged to Airtel, he informed.

Achieving handsome results by focusing on the rural sector, Airtel had expanded its network to cover 12,000 towns and villages in the state, most of them with a population of below 5000. It's 35,000 outlets in the state was also the highest in the country, he added.

Mr Kapoor said ''increasingly a larger share is coming from smaller towns and villages. Hence our major emphasis will be to penetrate small towns and villages with a population of 5000 or less. Only this way we will be able to cover the whole country.''

UNI