Airtel announces V-fiber broadband offering high speed internet and unlimited voice calling in 87 cities

Airtel has issued a statement saying that it will be offering ‘V-Fiber’ technology based broadband services to 87 cities across India. Speeds will top 100Mbps. The service will first be offered in Chennai and will be rolled out to other cities in the coming weeks. Airtel will also offer a 3-month free, unlimited trial to new customers. The company adds that modem charges will be fully refunded within the first month if users are not happy with the connection. Airtel states that this technology will not require any additional digging up of roads for the laying of cables. Instead, the company will use ‘vectorization’ to provide “last-mile connectivity” over existing copper lines. What is vectorization? Normally, the data for your wired internet connection comes over, well, a wire. This wire is made up of a number of copper strands that are multiplexed (multiple signals are transferred over the wire). You can increase the number of wires or the amount of multiplexing, but that would increase interference, this will degrade the signal quality and limit data transfer capabilities. With vectorization, dedicated hardware is used to measure and cancel this interference. The result? Minimal interference and higher bandwidth on tap. Airtel is essentially upgrading all its exchanges to support V-fibre and the “last-mile copper” uses vectorization to ensure that Airtel can provide the full bandwidth you’re paying for, at minimal cost. All Airtel broadband subscribers will now also get free, unlimited voice calling to any network in the country. The company is also caching data at its data centres to improve performance for its users. Airtel states that vectorization and V-fibre are part of Project Leap, Airtel’s network transformation program.