WHY USER EXPERIENCE HASN’T SLIPPED IN VODA-IDEA MESS
Forbes describes Kumar Mangalam Birla as “Commodities King”. In 1995, when he took charge of the Aditya Birla Group at 28, the conglomerate incorporated Idea Cellular. Mobile telephony in India was in a nascent stage then. Today, the country’s 1.1 billion wireless subscribers consume nearly 26,000 petabytes of data every quarter (one petabyte equals one million gigabytes). So, Birla’s decision to step down from the board of Vodafone-idea (Vi) Limited, an entity formed after a merger with Vodafone Plc, comes at a time when India’s telecom industry is struggling to prevent a duopoly situation.
That Vi’s financials have been in a mess lately is wellknown. With debt touching ~1.8 trillion, interest payouts alone accounted for 43 per cent of its net sales in 2020-21.
But amid the company’s failing financials, has subscriber experience of the Vi network also taken a beating? Not so, it seems. Financial stress did slam the brakes on its expansion plans, but a comparison with rival Bharti Airtel indicates that Vi’s network performance did not deteriorate much. In fact, the download speed on its 4G network is faster than on Bharti Airtel’s. Recent reports by third-party agencies like Open signal place Vi at the top by download speed experience. However, in comparison with Reliance Jio, the third private sector telecom player, both Vi and Airtel lag behind.
The merger of Vodafone and Idea might have had some bearing on the company’s network performance. Data crowdsourced by sector regulator Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) suggest that data speeds on the network might have fallen in recent months. Speeds experienced by users until May 2021, when data for Vodafone and Idea was recorded separately, were higher than those recorded after June 2021, when users of both networks began to be considered as belonging to the merged entity, Vi.
In fact, the quantum of spectrum addition by Vi pales in comparison to rivals Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio in 2019-20 and 2020-21. The number of new towers it added is also substantially lower than the two.
Even so, Vi has maintained data quality. That’s primarily because the telco had a large spectrum holding from its past acquisitions. What the future may hold is a different story.