Leading Indian telecom companies Vodafone Idea (Vi) and Bharti Airtel will sell all of their ownership in their joint venture, FireFly, which provides Wi-Fi. According to an ET story, FireFly would be sold to two funds: one located in the Middle East and the other in London, the Digital Infrastructure Fund (DIA). The two telecoms will be FireFly’s customers even after they sold their shares. A Wi-Fi firm called FireFly assists telcos in shifting their mobile network traffic to Wi-Fi networks in regions with high levels of congestion or low cell tower capacity.
Deal value is not included in the report. Nonetheless, the new owners would put up to USD 100 million in investments over the following two years following the deal’s conclusion. This will facilitate the company’s national Wi-Fi infrastructure expansion. Prior to the talks ending in a transaction, Cisco and FireFly were in discussions to buy the latter. After that, the business and the Digital Infrastructure Accelerator had a conversation.
Vodafone Idea and Airtel weren’t too enthusiastic to invest more money in the business. For the past two years, FireFly has thus been actively seeking additional investors. To solve capacity concerns, the telcos would prefer to concentrate on the deployment and growth of 5G. The entire goal of FireFly is to enable telecom operators to take advantage of their infrastructure in order to provide seamless mobile network connectivity services to consumers at a lower cost. Since 5G won’t be available everywhere in India for a few years, FireFly will be able to increase its market share and maybe grow its income with the additional funding.