Indian billionaire takes on India's top wireless carrier to enhance voice and data service

Top Indian telecommunications carrier, Bharti Airtel Ltd plans to invest 600 billion rupees, or $8.98 billion, to face heated competition against the country's richest man, Mukesh Ambani, who plans to invest $15 billion on 4G broadband network services.

Reuters reported that Bharti Airtel will allocate most of the investments on infrastructure to enhance voice and data services in India, which has a bad reputation for its poor mobile connectivity. Bharti Airtel's India and South Asia chief executive Gopal Vittal said the investment will come from cash accruals. This will include capital expenditure at about $2.2 billion from 2015 to March 2016.

"The programme, called Project Leap, will see a network transformation. Large parts of this investment will improve voice services," Vittal said in a report by Gadgets 360. "We are confident that 'Project Leap' will help Airtel build a smart and dynamic network that will significantly improve the quality of both voice and data services across the length and breadth of the country. More importantly we are excited to share the 'Project Leap' plan with each of our customers in their specific locality. This we believe will help us serve our customers with transparency and clarity" 

Bloomberg wrote that Bharti Airtel head billionaire Sunil Mittal said the company would invest the money on a three year period. It adds to the 1.6 trillion rupees the telecommunication giant has already invested into network infrastructure, which includes submarine cables, fiber, and spectrum. The New Delhi-based company aims to stay in the leadership position in the voice and data service industry in India, which has a potential 1 billion subscribers.

According to government data, there are 970 million mobile phone subscriptions in the country. Last year smartphone users hit a record 140 million, and are projected to hit 651 million by 2019.

With that figure, multiple companies are scrambling for the market share. This is why Billionare Ambani's Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd is entering the industry with low-cost 4G services. This gives more reason for Bharti Airtel to be aggressive in protecting market share.