Joint managing director of Bharti Tele-Ventures Rajan Mittal said the expenditure would also include rolling out rural telephony to an additional 2,200 towns by the end of the current financial year, as well as introducing fixed line and broadband connections in several big cities.
Bharti had already touched 2,800 small towns across the country as a part of its rural telephony programme.
Mittal said there was some network issues in providing rural telephony, adding that the company had already taken up the matter with the government.
Airtel's subscriber base was 13 million, he said adding that the growth for Bharti exceeded that of the industry.
The telecom industry was adding two to 2.5 million connections per month, he said adding that 80 per cent was in the GSM category. Bharti's market share in the GSM segment was 26 per cent.
On other initiatives, Mittal said the company would set up Future Factories, which would be centres of innovation for pioneering mobile applications.
Future Factory had been conceptualised with the purpose of developing applications to cater to the needs of customer segments across the spectrum, he said.
For this purpose, Bharti had entered into arrangements with companies like Intel and Ericsson, which would provide the technology. Initially, Bharti would set up these Future Factories in seven big cities including Kolkata.
The four main areas would be mobile entertainment, mobile commerce, wireless business solutions and rural applications, he said.
Mittal said for proper growth of wireless telephony, more spectrum was needed. For introducing 3G technology, the government would have to provide more spectrum to the operators, he added.
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