Bharti Airtel Pays Spectrum Dues of Rs 3,626 Crore to Government

Bharti Airtel, one of the big telecom companies, said on Thursday that it has paid the spectrum outstanding amount of Rs 3,626 crore to the Telecom Department. This spectrum was purchased by the company in 2016. Bharti Airtel had to pay an interest rate of more than eight percent for this outstanding amount.

The company has told the stock exchange in its filing that it has paid spectrum dues of more than Rs 28,000 crore in this calendar year. Bharti Airtel has rapidly expanded its 5G network. Recently the company has given a contract worth millions of dollars to Finland’s telecom equipment maker Nokia. Nokia has said that this deal includes using equipment from its 5G AirScale portfolio. Airtel plans to increase its coverage and capacity. For this, this contract has been given to Nokia. This also includes modernizing Airtel’s existing 4G network with multiband radios and baseband equipment. These equipment can also support 5G network.

Airtel may soon buy the direct-to-home (DTH) business of Tata Play. Talks are going on between the two companies for this. However, Tata Play’s DTH service is running in loss. Buying this business will increase the company’s presence in the digital TV segment. The company is facing tough competition from DishTV and some other companies in this segment.

Earlier this month, Airtel had said that more than 8 billion spam calls have been warned on its network. About two and a half months ago, the company had launched a solution based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to deal with the problem of spam calls and messages. After this, the company’s subscribers are warned about receiving spam calls and messages. With the help of this solution, about 10 lakh spammers are identified every day on its network. Six percent of all calls and approximately two percent of all SMS on the company’s network were identified as spam. Maximum number of spam calls are received in the capital Delhi. In the last two and a half months, Bharti Airtel has warned more than 25 crore subscribers about suspicious calls.