India has some of the most affordable internet in the world, but affordable data has its downsides. Home broadband has grown fast. Connections are quicker and easier to get than before. Plans of 200 Mbps, 500 Mbps and even 1 Gbps are now quite common. But the speed on paper often doesn’t match what you get at home. The internet may be great in the living room and poor in the bedroom. A video buffers at the best moment, a work call drops because of a wall, and the Wi-Fi gets weaker the farther you move from the router. So who is at fault? Is it the internet connection, or the equipment that spreads the speed around your home? To find out, and to learn what is changing in home broadband and how Excitel plans to deal with it, Digit spoke with Varun Pasricha, Excitel’s Chief Executive Officer.
Pasricha said the company is getting ready to launch Wi-Fi 6 routers, followed by mesh networking, to improve speed and coverage inside homes. He added that this is part of a bigger plan as Excitel wants to make broadband about quality and customer experience, and not just about faster speeds at low prices. We also talked about rising broadband costs, frequent outages, satellite internet like Starlink, the role of 6G, and the company’s plans for digital entertainment. With Wi-Fi 6 at the center of its next phase, Excitel wants to fix a problem many users know well: paying for fast internet but not getting that speed in the rooms where they need it.
India has made broadband internet more affordable over the years, but the equipment used to deliver that connection at home has not always kept pace with technology. According to Varun, Indian broadband providers still have room to improve the routers they offer customers. He explained the gap by comparing the equipment used in India with what is available in other markets.
Pasricha said, ‘The routers that we deploy in our homes are 10 years behind the routers you’ll find in Dubai, or in Europe, or in the US.’ He did not place the blame on consumers. He said Excitel, Jio and Airtel are ‘all three of us equally guilty’, and that the reason is low prices.
He believes affordability is one of the main reasons for this difference. Broadband companies need to keep prices low while also spending money on better equipment and services for customers.
Asked about recent price hikes, Pasricha said Excitel adjusts its plans from time to time, and that Airtel, Jio and ACT have also tweaked their broadband prices without making news of it. He said the sector is under pressure from rising equipment and network costs. Memory prices, he said, have gone up six to seven times, and since the biggest hardware component in a router is memory, Excitel’s procurement cost for such hardware has ‘not just gone up by a few percent, but has more than doubled’. He also explained how fibre cable prices have changed. The drop wire that runs from the pole to the router ‘used to be like a Rs 5 – Rs 6 per meter cable,’ he said. ‘This today has gone to Rs 15 per meter.’
According to Pasricha, the cost of hardware involved in setting up and maintaining broadband connections has gone up two to three times over the last eight to nine months. He stressed that he was not speaking as an industry representative, but said he expects the sector to see gradual price increases over a long period. ‘I would say we need a 40 per cent price repair, maybe over 5 years,’ he said, adding that a ‘6-7 per cent price increase per year should be the trajectory for a healthy industry.’ He put the industry’s required average revenue per user at around Rs 700, up from about Rs 500 today. He also pointed out that Excitel is not the cheapest option: its starting plans are 5-10 per cent more expensive than Jio’s and Airtel’s, though he says it offers about six times the speed.
While Pasricha did not announce specific price changes for Excitel, the company is working to enhance the customer experience. Speaking to Digit, he revealed that Excitel is testing standalone Wi-Fi 6 routers and Wi-Fi 6-based mesh systems in a test environment. He said a Wi-Fi 6 solution should launch within the next two to three months, and confirmed that customers can expect it in the first quarter of 2027.
Pasricha explained that current Wi-Fi 5 routers can limit the speed customers actually receive over a wireless connection. Even if a customer has a 1 Gbps broadband plan, the Wi-Fi connection tops out at around 200 to 300 Mbps, he said.
‘If you put a cable directly into the router and into your laptop, you might get that 1 Gbps you bought, but it won’t come on Wi-Fi,’ he said.
However, with its new Wi-Fi 6 routers, Excitel expects to improve both speed and coverage. He said the new routers can ‘push this envelope from 300 Mbps to almost 1 Gbps on Wi-Fi’, while also delivering that speed across a much larger portion of the house. He described it as almost a 2x difference in Wi-Fi coverage within the home. He also said the new routers operate on the 6 GHz band, which is more commonly associated with Wi-Fi 6E, so which standard will ship is something Excitel is yet to clarify.
The change matters because customers experience broadband through everyday activities such as streaming videos, downloading files, and using their devices in different rooms. A fast plan is of limited use if the signal does not reach the place where someone needs it.
During the interview, we asked Pasricha whether customers would still need separate networking equipment for different floors after upgrading to Wi-Fi 6. His response made it clear that better technology has its limits, as he said, ‘beyond a point, it’s physics.’
A centrally positioned router, he said, should cover a 3 BHK very well, as long as the home is compact and square-shaped. But a home spread across two storeys, or one with a longer layout, will need a mesh router in addition to the Wi-Fi 6 router.
Excitel plans to launch its mesh systems about two to three months after the standalone router, once it has collected market feedback. Customers with bigger homes and multiple floors would then have a solution too. The final pricing and whether the routers will be free, rented, or sold were not discussed.
Varun points out that Excitel focuses on fast internet and quick service restoration when something goes wrong. Talking about the operating areas of Excitel, Varun says they mainly operate in open, low-rise neighbourhoods where cables run overhead. These cables can be damaged by storms, construction work, or even monkeys.
Pasricha also pointed out that since 2021, Excitel has promised to fix any outage within four hours, and the company also compensates the customer with a free day for every four hours missed.
Talking about the success rate, he said that 82 per cent of disruption tickets are closed within the assigned limit, and that the average customer stays with Excitel for more than five years. However, he was not particularly satisfied with the results and told Digit that he aims to come as close as possible to 100 per cent.
He credited the company’s partner model for the 82 per cent success rate. Further explaining the model, he told us that the last-mile network is deployed and maintained by a local cable operator, called an Excitel Regional Partner. They are paid on a revenue share, and so when a customer is offline, they earn nothing.
We also raised a pattern that several Excitel users, including people we know, have noticed: outages of an hour to an hour and a half every so often. Pasricha said these are usually area-wide outages caused by a cut in the fibre linking the local partner’s office to Excitel’s data centres. In such cases, he said, the SLA is about 30 minutes, but splicing the cable typically takes an hour to an hour and a half.
The app does not let users raise a ticket during such an outage and instead shows a countdown. He said it happens ‘once a month, once in two months’, which he called unavoidable in the Indian urban context. These claims come from the company, and customers’ experience may vary.
Routers are not the only area where Excitel is looking to improve its offering. Pasricha also highlighted the company’s work on making entertainment content easier to access. Excitel is working with over-the-top video-on-demand services and is trying to partner with broadcasters to bring paid TV channels, such as Star Plus, to customers in an app-first format. He said the company wants to improve how customers interact with content, not just provide access to it.
Asked about 6G, Pasricha said it is a mobile technology and not relevant to a fibre-to-the-home player. He said it should bring mobile experience closer to broadband, but that it will face the same problem as 5G. The higher the generation, the harder it is for the signal to get past walls. In his view, 6G and home Wi-Fi over fibre are complementary technologies.
Satellite broadband is attracting attention as an alternative way to connect homes and businesses, particularly in places where conventional internet infrastructure is difficult to deploy. With Starlink bringing satellite-based internet into the wider conversation, we asked Pasricha whether satellite connectivity was part of Excitel’s future plans.
His answer suggested that the company is not looking to enter this segment for now. Pasricha said, ‘Satellite broadband as a technology is a technology which is meant for rural, agricultural, and, you know, distant, far off-grid kind of locations.’ He added that Excitel intends to remain focused on dense urban environments, including large cities and towns, at least for the time being.
Talking about the numbers backing FY26, the company reported a turnover of Rs 530 crore and a profit after tax of Rs 46 crore. It was the company’s first profitable year. Pasricha described the financial position as strong, saying, ‘We are now pretty profitable and self-sufficient.’
For the upcoming FY27, Excitel is targeting top-line growth of 8 to 9 per cent, taking turnover to around Rs 570 crore to Rs 580 crore. Varun also pointed out that the company plans to strengthen its presence in existing markets, including Delhi NCR, parts of Uttar Pradesh, Hyderabad and Bengaluru, before gradually expanding into Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities.
Excitel has around a million customers today. Pasricha said the company wants to compete on the experience it delivers rather than simply offering the lowest price. ‘We do not want to be price fighters. We do not want to be known as the cheaper, faster player,’ he said, adding, ‘We want to reach that 10 million milestone not by being the cheapest player, but by being the most dependable, value-driven broadband provider for Indian households.’
Excitel’s Wi-Fi 6 plans point towards a broader change in the way broadband providers may compete for customers. Speed and price remain important, but they do not tell the whole story. The equipment inside the home, the reliability of the connection and the ease of accessing content can all shape the customer experience.
There are still questions that only a commercial launch can answer, including the final pricing, which Wi-Fi standard the routers will use, the performance across different home layouts, and how widely the new equipment will be available.