Airtel’s ₹299 prepaid plan has returned after being withdrawn in August, but the reversal is more significant than a change to one tariff. It reflects the pressure facing India’s telecom operators as they try to raise average revenue per user while maintaining customer additions among consumers who remain sensitive to handset and service costs. At the same time, Airtel is repositioning itself around postpaid services, fibre, data centres, cloud and artificial intelligence, making the company’s strategy part of a wider transition in India’s digital infrastructure.
The 28-day plan offers 1 GB of data a day and was restored after Bharti Airtel reported a sharp slowdown in net customer additions in the quarter ended September 30. The company’s net additions fell to 716,000 in the second quarter of 2026-27, from 3.3 million in the preceding quarter. Churn increased by three basis points sequentially to 2.9 per cent.
Airtel’s response indicates that pricing decisions are being used not only to acquire customers but also to manage the quality and value of its subscriber base. The company’s average revenue per user remained the highest among the major operators cited in the report, at ₹271 in Q2FY27, compared with ₹218.8 for Reliance Jio. Airtel’s challenge is therefore not simply to add the largest number of users. It is to grow revenue without losing customers at the lower end of the market.
The return of the Airtel prepaid plan shows the difficulty of balancing those objectives. The company had removed the entry-level offering in August, but customer additions weakened during the following quarter. Although the company did not respond to queries by the time of the report, Chief Executive Officer Shashwat Sharma said during the earnings call that there had been a change in prepaid tariffs and that the pricing intervention had already produced results in Q2.
That statement places the plan’s restoration within a broader revenue strategy. Airtel now intends to rely on plan upgrades, postpaid connections, international roaming and top-ups to sustain ARPU growth in the coming quarters. The approach suggests a more segmented market in which operators seek to retain entry-level users while encouraging customers with greater capacity to pay to move towards higher-value products.
The entry-level market remains closely tied to the cost of devices. Sharma said rising prices for entry-level smartphones had contributed to softer customer additions and slower shipments, particularly among users transitioning from 2G to 4G or 5G. The refurbished smartphone market, however, was expanding and supporting upgrades among entry-level users.
This is an important constraint on digital access. A telecom plan can be affordable on paper, but its practical value depends on whether users can obtain a compatible device. The source material does not establish the scale of the affordability gap or provide a national breakdown of users affected by handset prices. It does, however, connect Airtel’s slower additions with the cost of entry-level smartphones and the pace of movement from older networks to 4G and 5G.
The situation also exposes the limits of viewing telecom competition only through tariff comparisons. Operators are attempting to monetise different stages of a customer’s digital life: basic voice and data access, higher data consumption, postpaid services, roaming, home broadband, financial services and enterprise technology. The prepaid tariff is one part of that system, but it remains the most visible point of contact for price-sensitive users.
Airtel executives also said the industry would eventually need to move away from relatively low-priced plans offering unlimited voice and data towards models that better monetise actual data consumption. The statement points to a potential shift in how mobile access is packaged and priced. The supplied material does not indicate when such a shift will occur or how it would affect consumers, but it establishes that operators are examining the relationship between low tariffs, data usage and revenue growth.
The company’s home broadband strategy reflects another layer of the same infrastructure transition. Airtel is scaling back the expansion of fixed wireless access, or FWA, and treating it as an interim solution for capturing demand until fibre connectivity reaches a particular area. This distinction matters because wireless broadband can provide faster deployment, while fibre represents the longer-term physical network that Airtel says it is waiting to extend into those locations.
The report does not provide Airtel’s fibre rollout numbers, the number of FWA users affected or a timetable for specific areas. It does show that the company is separating temporary access from permanent network infrastructure. For households, this means the quality and durability of broadband availability may depend on which technology is deployed locally and whether fibre eventually reaches the area.
Airtel’s data-centre plans show how its growth strategy is moving beyond consumer connectivity. Executive Vice Chairman Gopal Vittal said newly acquired land in Visakhapatnam could support a data centre with capacity of 400-500 megawatts. Airtel is also scouting other locations as it seeks to take its overall data-centre capacity above 1 gigawatt.
The company linked this expansion to the possibility that demand from the United States could be directed towards India. It is also developing modular units to accelerate data-centre construction and examining larger parcels of land at the edge of networks. The strategy includes studying GPU-as-a-service, which requires additional software and orchestration, as well as providing artificial intelligence services as a stack to existing customers on top of cloud and data-centre infrastructure.
These plans widen the meaning of telecom infrastructure. Networks are no longer only towers, fibre cables and mobile spectrum. They increasingly include computing capacity, data storage, cloud platforms and the systems required to run AI applications. Airtel’s proposed investment in Visakhapatnam therefore connects a local land and infrastructure decision with the company’s broader attempt to participate in data-intensive businesses.
The available material does not establish the project’s construction timeline, investment value, power source, water requirements or employment impact. It also does not confirm whether the proposed capacity will be built entirely at the Visakhapatnam site or how the company’s overall capacity target will be phased. Those details will be important for assessing the urban and infrastructure consequences of large data-centre developments.
The company’s stated growth bets also include Airtel Money, Airtel Finance, Airtel Payments Bank, Airtel Cloud and financial services. Airtel said it was building synergies across network, technology, operations and supply chains, including with Indus Towers, which is expanding in Africa. This indicates an institutional strategy in which consumer telecom, digital finance, cloud services and physical network infrastructure are managed as connected businesses.
For cities, the most consequential part of this strategy may be the relationship between digital demand and physical capacity. Mobile users need affordable plans and compatible devices. Broadband customers require reliable last-mile connections. Cloud and AI businesses require land, electricity, connectivity and specialised facilities. These demands are linked, but they are not evenly distributed across locations or income groups.
The restoration of the ₹299 plan confirms that the lower end of the market remains commercially important even as Airtel pursues higher-value services. The company’s reported slowdown in additions and higher churn show that customer acquisition cannot be separated from affordability, handset prices and network migration. At the same time, its data-centre and cloud plans demonstrate that the next phase of telecom competition will extend into the physical infrastructure of computing.
What remains uncertain is how long the restored prepaid plan will remain available, whether it will materially improve additions, and how Airtel will balance entry-level access with its stated objective of raising ARPU. The company’s next quarterly results, broadband deployment decisions and progress on its planned data-centre capacity will provide the clearest evidence of whether this strategy can connect wider digital access with stronger infrastructure-led growth.
