Promoter confidence in Vodafone Idea (Vi) has climbed this week after billionaire industrialist Kumar Mangalam Birla boosted his stake in the ailing telecom operator by buying several crore of shares on the open market, lifting investor sentiment and helping the company’s stock jump sharply in recent sessions. Birla’s latest acquisitions, made over multiple trading days, signal continued support for the business as it navigates a competitive and capital‑intensive telecom market.
Meanwhile, Bharti Airtel says its artificial intelligence‑powered spam detection systems have identified more than 71 billion unwanted calls and nearly 2.9 billion spam text messages across its network since the solution went live in 2024, a reflection of the scale of nuisance communication in India’s telecom ecosystem. The company has also blocked hundreds of thousands of fraudulent links as part of its ongoing efforts to protect subscribers from scams and deceptive communications.
In related industry developments, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is considering new measures that would allow action against numbers flagged repeatedly by AI systems as spam, even without formal user complaints. If approved, this move could extend regulatory oversight over automatic spam flagging, although it may raise concerns for certain businesses or frequent callers whose communications might be misidentified by automated filters.
On the infrastructure front, major Indian telecom carriers, including Airtel, Reliance Jio and Vi, are urging policymakers to improve procedures around subsea cable repairs and maintenance. These undersea fibre‑optic cables carry almost all international internet traffic, and recent global disruptions have exposed weaknesses in repair timeliness. Industry groups want streamlined approval processes, recognition of subsea systems as critical telecom infrastructure, and incentives to build local repair capabilities so that latency and service interruptions can be reduced during cable faults.
Together, these shifts show how India’s telecom industry is balancing financial confidence and investment with technology‑driven network quality challenges and strategic infrastructure priorities in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
