Spectra in talks with ALT Balaji, Eros Now to offer bundled content

Spectra is operational in eight cities and offers fibre-based broadband services to home users at 100Mbps data speeds.

India has 18.33 million wired subscribers. (Gurminder Singh/ HT Photo)

Optical fibre-based broadband service provider Spectra, earlier known as Spectranet, is in talks with OTT players such as ALT Balaji and Eros Now to offer bundled content to its customers. The company already offers bundled content from Hungama catalogue.

"The biggest advantage of 100Mbps data speed, which we offer, is to watch a lot of videos. We are working with various partners to offer value added services to our customers. Though the deals haven't been finalised yet, we are talking to ALT Balaji, Eros Now and other key players in the segment. As and when the partnerships materialise, the content from partners will be automatically added to Spectranet's packages," Udit Mehrotra, MD & CEO of Spectra told Hindustan Times.

Spectra is operational in eight cities, namely Delhi, Gurugram, Ghaziabad, Noida Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru and Chennai among others. "We serve close to 40,000 home (fibre-based) broadband users. Our aim is to cover 25% of 10 million households in NCR and other bigger cities. We are an urban focused service provider and our goal is to go further deeper in these cities before we roll out other regions in the country," Udit added.

On possible disruption in the broadband segment with Reliance Jio's entry, Udit said that the move will be beneficial for the market.

Spectra had recently gotten a lot of attention when it topped Netflix's data speed rankings in India. The company surpassed 7 Star Digital and broadband giant like Airtel in the listing. Spectra, a relatively smaller player in the broadband market, is offering 100Mbps data speeds to its customers at lower packages, compared to Airtel's. The company also offers schemes such as roll over (transfer of unused data to next month's quota) and bundled content.

According to TRAI's telecom subscription data as on June 30, 2017, BSNL held 55.05% share in the wireline market followed by Airtel that had 16.17% market share. The report further revealed that India has 18.33 million wired broadband subscribers in the country.

BSNL leads the wireline market. (TRAI)

BSNL leads the wireline market. (TRAI)

Spectra, however, isn't the only company to aggressively push the optical fibre network. Airtel in October last year announced deploying V-Fibre network to offer data speeds up to 100Mbps. Airtel's new fibre network is available in eight cities namely Chennai, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Bhopal, Indore, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Pune. The company is soon going to expand the network to the following cities: Kolkata, Jaipur, Chandigarh, Raipur, Lucknow, Noida, Gurugram, Delhi, Ghaziabad and Faridabad.