ACT looks for OTT bundles to take on telcos on home broadband

Internet service provider ACT Fibernet is looking to strengthen its presence in other tier-1 and tier-2 cities such as Delhi, Ghaziabad, Salem, Trichy and Ahmedabad by investing in network improvement, improving customer experience, and aggressively competing with the telco heavyweights.

The ISP-Category A licence holder is aggressively looking to compete with OTT bundled offerings provided by telcos for fibre-to-home connections at competitive prices by forging partnerships.

“We provide differentiated offerings to our customers as per their needs. Customers who seek entertainment bundles, can choose our bundle plans that come with 300+ TV channels, Netflix, Hotstar, Zee5, Sony, Sunnxt and other OTT apps,” said Karthik Ravi Karthik Chief Marketing Officer, ACT Fibernet.

Atria Convergence Technologies (ACT) has lately gained significant market share in South India and emerged among the leaders in broadband service quality in Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad trumping even the telco heavyweights Airtel and Jio, according to OpenSignal’s latest findings.

“We believe in providing superior products and service experience to our customers, who will hence reward us with higher market share,” the executive said.

The revamp of its SuperApp with features such as ticketing, billing, installation and tracking engineer activity has also helped ACT cater to 70% of its customers.

ACT is particularly bullish on the online gaming sector which has transformed into a $3 billion industry in India, thanks to provision of superior network connectivity and affordable smartphones.

“For gamers to compete in online tournaments, they require significantly low latency and ping rates ensuring the least delay in the transfer of data to and from the users’ connected device to the game server,” he said adding that ACT has partnered with the likes of Nodwin Gaming to offer dedicated connectivity at events like DreamHack India.

ACT said it has invested more than Rs 100 crores in the last few years for expanding data centres, network capacity, network securitisation and in-home Wi-Fi experience, which has led to 60% reduction in customer complaints.

“We have invested in building point-to-point links between key cities, expanding data center capacities, securitisation of its network through underground cables and multiple redundancy links, leveraging AI for optimal traffic management and proactive troubleshooting,” Karthik said.

“Due to this, we have been able to increase uptime, improved service excellence which has led to reduction in calls per subscriber to our support centres by more than 60%, while also growing our subbase in this period,” he added.

As per the recently released two-year state of internet report 2023 by ACT Fibernet, the total data consumption per user across ACT cities has gone up by over 25%, reaching north of 350 GB per month per customer with downloads going up by more than 27%.

According to its latest regulatory filings, ACT’s revenue for fiscal year 2022 grew 9.8% on yearly basis to reach Rs 2,157 crore. Its net profit stood at Rs 342 crore, which was down 14.3%.