Airtel working on small cells on street poles to reduce call drops: Gopal Vittal

Interview with CEO, Bharti Airtel

Amid rising complaints of call drops and poor network, Bharti Airtel on Thursday announced the commercial launch of its fourth-generation (4G) data service. In an interview with Mansi Taneja, the company's chief executive, Gopal Vittal, talks about data service, including 4G, assuming an important role and working on new technology solutions for minimising call drops. Edited excerpts:

You have gone live with your fourth-generation (4G) data service across 296 towns. Is the Indian ecosystem ready for 4G?

Absoutely. About five million 4G devices will be shipped in India this quarter, which is enough of a tipping point. For the last one year, we have been working with a device ecosystem to bring down the cost of prices. Within 12 months, the price of a 4G-enabled handset has come down to around Rs 6,000 from Rs 22,000 to Rs 25,000 earlier.

But, your competitor Reliance Jio has promised 4G devices below Rs 4000? And, what impact you see after the launch of Jio's services?

The handset prices may fall up to Rs 5,000, depending on market conditions and the 4G uptake.

The cost of a handset is the size of the screen, the quality of the camera, and the chipset inside it. If you do away with all this, the prices can come down to Rs 4,000 to Rs 4,500, but the question is what features you want in your phone and that's the trade-off. But definitely, over a period, the prices will come down.

Our business does not operate based on what our competitors are likely to do or not. Airtel has always survived in competition. We are children of competition in a way and we work in a brutal marketplace which makes us better and sharper.

There have been rising complaints over call drops. Operators have been blaming it on less towers. Any short-term solution?

Call drops are not restricted to Delhi-National Capital Region. Because of tower issues, cities such as Patna, Jaipur, Chennai, Hyderabad, and others also face call drops. We need to have more tower sites and need a transparent and simple framework to acquire sites. Even the telecom minister has agreed to help us add more sites.

We are also educating our customers about the situation.

Besides, we are working on smarter solutions such as the deployment of small cells, which are energy-efficient and can be installed on street poles and even look elegant. We have a lab, where we are working on such solutions. We are also scaling up our in-building solutions to enhance network coverage. The amount of traffic per megahertz (MHz) of spectrum in our cities is 13 times that in Shanghai. In Lutyens' Delhi, we need 217 sites, but we have only 110. Seoul has eight times the number of sites that Delhi has, and operators there have 10 times the spectrum an Indian operator has.

India will always have shortage of spectrum, so we need to have new tower sites.

Airtel has been facing pressure on data rates and even the realisation has come down. Where you do see data rates going?

Realisations have been going down over the past seven to eight quarters, but data consumption is increasing.

For instance, if people were given 1 GB at Rs 250, they were using 500 MB on average, giving us 50 paise/MB, but if they use full 1 GB, the realisation comes down to 25 paise. But still, the data consumption is growing.