‘Maintaining quality of service and geographic coverage are the top most investment priorities for airtel’
Confident of braving new challenges and responsibilities, Jagbir Singh in the initial days of donning the responsibility of the newly appointed director of Bharti airtel, has proved his mettle by assisting the brand grab the ‘Telecom Center of Excellence
Recently, Bharti was acknowledged with the TCOE Award for the best delivery of network services. How do you ensure quality delivery? It’s always an honor to be recognized for what the company stands for. In any service industry, the first and foremost aspect is the quality of service you provide to the customer, and at Bharti that is the way of life.
Ensuring network quality is done at 3 levels:
Outside-in Approach: Customer experience on ground is mapped vis-à-vis competition at a granular level through third party benchmarking and various independent customer surveys.
Technology Advantage Approach: Implementing all the technological enhancements/improvements/features which help in enhancing customer experience. Inside-out Approach: Network key performance indicators are monitored and implemented with vigor. What kind of infrastructure is required for quality checking with respect to a network? As you are aware airtel is the pioneer in its model of managed services through its partners. The uniqueness of this outsourcing partnership is that it is centered
around reward and penalties for quality delivery. The complete design revolves around delivering service quality on all 3 approaches mentioned above.
Apart from the partner ecosystem being centered around quality delivery, we have a very strong internal quality monitoring and analysis team at circle, hub, and center level. This team blends the customer experience on ground aspects (through other means like the customer complaints/experience benchmarking, etc) with the network performance indicators delivered by the partner, to ensure they go hand in hand and the end-customer gets the service experience he expects.
Why is there a perception that the quality of voice is still not robust, and there still are call drops? Customer expectation is growing day-byday because the competition is growing.
We often travel outside India, in fact, when we go to Barcelona we check how long it takes to get connected to the call, just to compare our network with others. So I would say, expectation from the customer is growing and on top of that there is a limitation of the spectrum.
Since the customer wants connectivity wherever he goes and he has bad experiences of call drops, hence he carries this perception that the network is not good. Nothing wrong with the customer’s perception, just something wrong with not having the network everywhere due to the limitations.
There are too many operators in the market, at least 8-9 operators on an average in a circle, and each one would be pumping the RF. Also, there is a lot of interference even in the air, there is no clean wave and guard band available. So, it’s not easy and you can’t have that kind of a clean spectrum.
To overcome these issues we have initiated in-building solutions. For example, we have put 400 pico sites and we keep putting the repeaters in the houses. It is good as long as it’s in the house, but the problem with the repeater is it adds to the interference in the environment. It’s not good to have too many repeaters. We started putting the in-building solution, which are basically for the multi-story buildings and offices, but the limitation with this is you cannot justify R 2,000 or R 1 lakh for every house and every house can’t afford this.
What are the constraints in maintaining a very robust quality of service, and how do we stand in comparison to international standards? An Indian customer is an evolved customer and the expectations are compa-
rable if not higher to the international standards. We do benchmarking studies, which give us our standings vis-à-vis the best in the world; the quality of service that our customers get is among the top 10-20 percentile in a lot of aspects. This is despite the fact that India has the smallest chunk of the basic resources to provide the network quality. Despite the constraints, the quality of service that we deliver is comparable to the international standards.
How much does Bharti invest in network’s quality, quality assurance, maintenance, etc?
Maintaining quality of service and geo- graphic coverage are the top most investments priorities for airtel and in that order. I cannot share the figures, but a very large proportion of our investments are to ensure we deliver robust quality of service to our customers. Besides manpower, we invest in benchmarking, analytics, customer experience management tools, and analyzers.
How is your network compared to others?
The whole award was about being compared on all aspects with respect to competition, and I am proud that we came out as winners. As stated earlier, we do a lot of benchmarking at the granular level, which helps us maintain a level above our competition. Our focus, the uniqueness of our managed services contracts with our partners, and the investments that we make help us maintain the quality of the network.
How prepared is Bharti to roll out 4G services in terms of network or infrastructure?
Technically, what you need for 4G is another layer of radio network riding on the same core network. It is easier said than done, as the biggest advantage of having 4G is to provide 80-100 Mbps of peak speeds. For providing this kind of experience, the complete backhaul network has to undergo a serious change right from the architecture to the equipment. The two most important aspects, apart from putting up the radio layer, are to have high-capacity IP microwaves and high density of fiber Pops to provide bandwidths commensurate to the radio capacity.
Being a player in the fixedline and in enterprise and SMB domain, the advantage we have is we already run a lot of fiber to the building. Apart from that, for 3G a lot of the microwave backhaul upgradation was already happening and 4G capitalizes on that to a certain extent.
I cannot say when are we going to launch 4G , but we shall see it in India in the near future.