Jio, Airtel set to triple data capacity, says IIFL Securities

India’s biggest telecom players Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel are set to triple their data capacities to almost 1400 PB (petabytes) by March 2024, IIFL Securities has said in a report.

This comes due to the fast-tracking of the 5G rollout in the country and the amount of data should be enough for daily traffic till 2025, the report said, adding it would also be enough to meet an unexpected surge in usage.

Channel checks by IIFL Securities revealed that the total data capacity for Airtel will rise to 849/556 PB a day in March 2024 from estimated 264/232 PB per day in September 2022.

The report said Airtel's data uptake would be lower than Jio's, with its current capacity being 85 percent of the total Jio bandwidth. Airtel's data traffic usage is also lower, only 60 percent of the data consumed by Jio users.

IIFL Securities estimated that the country would soon see an increase in per capita monthly data usage, which would surge to 40GB- 50GB, compared to the current upper limit of 20GB.

The combined capacity of Jio and Airtel can support anywhere from 140 million to 280 million subscribers with a data limit of 50GB a month, which is considering the install base of 5G is still around 70 million.

Of the 160 million annual smartphone shipments, only 30 to 40 percent of the handsets are 5G enabled. IIFL expects this to rise sharply once more phones are launched.

"Analysts at IIFL Securities estimate Jio’s Rs 2trn 5G investment to be split 44 percent%/32%/18%/6% between spectrum/BTS and radio/core and backhaul/FWA. Bharti’s outlay would be ~50% of this; it is likely to adopt a more calibrated rural 5G rollout and migration to SA from FY25 onwards," the report said.

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