Bharti Airtel, India’s second-largest telco, said that it fully aligns with and complies with the country’s net neutrality norms, and the newly-unveiled “Priority Postpaid” service does not include any content-based discrimination,” and there are no commercial arrangements with content providers. <\/p>\n
In a letter to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), dated May 25, 2026, the telco said, “Airtel is in full compliance with TRAI regulations, DoT licence conditions and relevant IT, 3GPP and TEC norms. Priority Oostpaid has been expressly designed to remain within India\u2019s net-neutrality framework.” <\/p>\n
The letter comes shortly after some sections blamed the telecom carrier for bypassing India’s net-neutrality norms following the launch of the Priority Postpaid plan on May 19, which uses 5G network slicing feature to offer a superior experience to its postpaid customers. <\/p>\n
Sunil Mittal-driven telco strongly defended the move, saying that it was a technology upgrade that makes the overall network more efficient and enhances the quality of service for postpaid subscribers. <\/p>\n
“There is a financial disincentive for Airtel to allow degradation of service for our prepaid customers,” it said in the letter, adding that prepaid experience remains central to its business, and any innovation\u2014including slicing\u2014is designed and monitored with this in mind. “We would never allow any degradation of QoS for our prepaid base.” <\/p>\n
ETTelecom’s queries to Bharti Airtel did not elicit a response. <\/p>\n
The Delhi-based telco has a postpaid subscriber base of 29 million, while nearly 345 million prepaid mobile customers account for 92% of Airtel\u2019s total customers, contributing 88% of the telco’s overall revenue.<\/p>\n
“The Airtel Priority feature does not degrade the quality of service for any customer, whether prepaid or postpaid.”<\/p>\n
In Q4FY26 results, Airtel said that its wireless data usage increased by 32.8% year-on-year, reaching 31.4GB per customer per month.<\/p>\n
Further, the telco said that the new plan ensures that no content is blocked, degraded, or throttled, and no preferential speeds or treatment are granted to any specific content, application, website, or over-the-top (OTT) platform. <\/p>\n
Currently, Airtel’s overall 5G capacity utilisation peaks at around 38%, which includes close to 4% postpaid traffic. <\/p>\n
“Prepaid and other non-Priority traffic continues to have additional headroom to roughly 60% of total capacity, making it clear that Priority Postpaid does not and cannot cause degradation for prepaid users,” Airtel said. <\/p>\n
It further said that the Priority Postpaid is implemented in a “content-neutral manner” and is fully consistent with the existing regulatory framework. “There is no blocking, throttling, content-specific prioritisation, zero-rating, or preferential treatment of any application.”<\/p>\n
Slicing is the only monetisation use case at scale on 5G mobility today, and it is the fundamental starting point of 6G networks, the letter added.<\/p>\n
In 2015, the telco had to withdraw its controversial “zero-rating platform” after critics blamed it for a violation of core principles of an open internet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bharti Airtel, India’s second-largest telco, said that it fully aligns with and complies with the country’s net neutrality norms, and the newly-unveiled “Priority Postpaid” service does not include any content-based discrimination,” and there are no commercial arrangements with content providers. In a letter to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), dated May 25, 2026, the telco said, “Airtel is in full compliance with TRAI regulations, DoT licence conditions and relevant IT, 3GPP and TEC norms. Priority Oostpaid has been expressly designed to remain within India\u2019s net-neutrality framework.” The letter comes shortly after some sections blamed the telecom carrier for bypassing India’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1010091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-telecom"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1010091"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1010092,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010091\/revisions\/1010092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1010091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1010091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1010091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}