Mobile telephony tariffs are at “unsustainably high levels,” said Bharti Airtel CEO Sanjay Kapoor on Monday.
Speaking on the sidelines of the launch of the company's 4 G (Long-Term Evolution-LTE) service in Karnataka, Mr. Kapoor said cellular operators were operating on a “marginal cost basis.”
“What is happening is unreal,” he said. “Affordability is contingent on prices of inputs such as spectrum,” he said. He denied the criticism that cheap spectrum prices had resulted in operators not using the scarce resource efficiently.
Telecom operators, Mr. Kapoor said, were unable to increase tariffs to cover investments in technology because of the “fierce competition.” “It would be a disaster if prices were to fall further,” he said.
Airtel, which has licenses for 4G services in Kolkata, Karnataka, Punjab and Maharashtra, has utilised the services of four different network providers ZTE (Kolkata), Huawei (Bangalore), Nokia-Siemens Network (Maharashtra) and Ericsson (Punjab). “It is never a good idea to put all eggs in one basket,” Mr. Kapoor said.
