Bharti Airtel gets DTH licence; to invest Rs. 150 cr

[Sukhdeep Singh]

Bharti Airtel gets DTH licence; to invest Rs. 150 cr. in Phase I

New Delhi, Sept. 23 (PTI): Bharti Airtel today said it has got licence to start Direct-To-Home services in the country and announced an investment of Rs 150 crores in the first phase to launch nation-wide operations, a move that would bring in much required competition in the DTH segment.
"We have received the licence and plan to launch pan-India services by the first quarter of next financial year," N Arjun, head of DTH operations, Bharti Airtel, told PTI.
Company officials said Bharti would be investing Rs 150 crore in the initial phase on infrastructure for which its has chosen Tendberg Television, a subsidiary of Sweedish telecom equipment major Ericsson.
Bharti Telemedia, a subsidiary of Bharti Airtel, handling DTH operations, will use a range of Tandberg Television's solutions including the iSIS 8000 IP head-end and MPEG-4 AVC standard definition encoders, Arjun said.
The system is one of the first and finest satellite DTH platforms in the world enabling increasing transponder capacity and potentially doubling the amount of available channels, he said.
The DTH services will be launched nationally across India and Bharti is setting up a state-of-the-art infrastructure near Gurgaon (Haryana) for the purpose of uplinking and broadcast.
By using the latest MPEG-4AVC video compression, and IP tenchnologies, Bharti can cost-effectively deliver more channels in less bandwidth, while still maintaining high quality pictures, officials said.

Source : http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus...0709231550.htm

[fun2sh]

good news coz it will increase the competition and provider consumers with choice.
BUT AIRTEL SUCKS!

BUT LETS HOPE FOR A LOOP HOLE IN AIRTEL'S DTH SERVICE TOO LIKE IT WAS IN AIRTEL'S GPRS

[Sukhdeep Singh]

Airtel Doesnt suck

Actually, when they enter into market....they come out with great offers and later once they capture it...they start charging new customers loads...

When they came in our city...they offered great plans for Broadband.....new customers now pay twice what i pay There is a loophole in Broadband aswell

[Gigacore]

Cool. thanks for the info

[ThinkFree]

Not a new news.

The market is going to change completely as a number of players are coming in the market like SUN,Reliance, Videocon as well as Airtel. Airtel is known for providing quality service and it is expected that they wont disappoint there too

[ax3]

superb news ..........

[Sukhdeep Singh]

I think, this year was more like Who Merges with whom, who enters DTH Market etc but certainly it was not year of BROADBAND

[praka123]

BROADBAND via DTH annny houpe ?

[sourav]

ok that a great news, but do u know that reliance has also got the license about 1-2 years ago, but they have not started their dth service yet.

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