Bharti Airtel (Airtel), India’s largest telecommunications services provider, on Thursday said that it doubled its mobile network deployment over the past two years in line with its objective of building a future ready network to lead India’s data growth story.

In the last two years (FY 16 and FY 17), Airtel has deployed 180,000 mobile sites across India. This is same as the number of mobile sites deployed by the company in the first 20 years of operations, making it one the largest mobile network rollouts globally.

In November 2015, Airtel launched Project Leap, its nationwide network transformation program to build a future ready network. The Company has committed an investment of Rs 60,000 crores over three years under this program.  

Airtel has also doubled its overall transmission capacity and increased the mobile backhaul capacity by eight times to roll out high speed broadband network with 4G and 3G coverage in all 22 telecom circles. This deployment has been supported by addition of 14,500+ KM of fibre to Airtel’s national fibre backbone along with 3666 new fibre POP nodes (highest ever deployed in Airtel network in single year).

“Airtel has been at the forefront of India’s telecom growth story and this record deployment underlines our commitment to building a world-class network of the future that will serve a digital India. This deployment will leverage our spectrum capacity and is yet another benchmark by Airtel in execution excellence. We are now in a position to ramp up future capacity on this network very quickly, giving us unmatched reach and agility. I want to thank our network partners for their support in this deployment,” said Abhay Savargaonkar, Director- Networks of Bharti Airtel.

Airtel has been rated as the fastest mobile network in India by Ookla –the globally recognised leader in mobile speed tests and also a benchmark for reputed global operators. As per travel app RailYatri, Airtel has offers the widest mobile network coverage on the go.