Bharti Airtel executives used the company’s Q4 FY26 earnings call to argue that India’s telecom pricing structure is “broken” due to unlimited plans and called for a differential pricing architecture, while acknowledging the company cannot do so alone in a competitive market.
Airtel pushes differential pricing and criticises unlimited data: Executive Vice-Chairman Gopal Vittal said India’s current telecom pricing structure prevents operators from charging higher rates for heavy users. “The price architecture in this country is broken,” Vittal said, adding that at “Rs 340-350, you’re capped out because you’re running unlimited data plans”, while responding to a question about accelerating Average Revenue Per Customer (ARPU) growth.
He contrasted India’s pricing with the US and Europe, where unlimited plans cost substantially more. Vittal said Airtel wants a more tiered pricing structure “moving from small, medium, large and extra-large”, with differentiated allowances that create “a natural pathway to upgradation”.
He then added, “It’s an unfortunate situation where the rich are paying less than they ought to, and the poor are perhaps paying as much as they need to.” Bharti Hexacom managing director Soumen Ray separately said the industry now has “a pack which destroys the whole price ladder”.
Meanwhile, Airtel managing director and chief executive officer (CEO) Shashwat Sharma said Airtel wants to accelerate ARPU growth through postpaid upgrades, higher consumption tiers and premium plans. Vittal, however, said Airtel cannot move alone because “it’s a competitive market”.
AI now ‘central’ to Airtel’s strategy: Sharma said, “AI is now central to our digital agenda.” During the quarter, Airtel’s AI systems detected 14 billion spam calls and more than 520 million spam messages. Sharma said Airtel’s “next best action” AI models generated 135 million actions to cross-sell Wi-Fi, postpaid and financial services.
He also disclosed that Airtel processed 375 million customer interactions through voice AI bots and analysed 256 million images through “Vision AI” systems for safety, design and workmanship checks. One of the largest disclosures came when Sharma said, “AI is contributing to nearly 30% of all code written at Airtel.”
Vittal additionally revealed that Airtel bought “a few hundred GPUs” for internal AI workloads. He said newer chips are now ”10x” more efficient than GPUs from roughly two-and-a-half years ago.
Airtel pitches sovereign cloud and edge infrastructure: Airtel executives also outlined plans for “Airtel Cloud”, saying it secured 24 cloud deals during FY26 and added more customers in April.
Vittal said, “A lot of workloads do need a sovereign requirement,” adding, “We are fully sovereign. We are controlled by an Indian entity. So the control plane, the data plane, the jurisdiction, all of it is in…
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