No requirement to invoke roaming arrangement: Airtel CTO

Bharti Airtel's chief technology officer on Tuesday played down the need for having intra circle roaming arrangement, for which the company had approached all its competitors earlier.

The telecom operator had said it is an important measure to avoid disruption in the networks to support work from home.

The company on March 23, wrote to Reliance Jio, Vodafone Idea, BSNL and MTNL for an intra circle roaming (ICR) arrangement terming it "of paramount importance" to serve the nation and prepare for any kind of exigency.

"Given that all operator networks have been stable despite the surge in traffic, as of now there has not been any requirement to invoke the ICR arrangement, which is an emergency measure," Randeep Sekhon, CTO, Bharti Airtel said in response to an email query.

Statement from Sekhon came on a day when network of Vodafone Idea faced outage at several place and the company resolved it after some time.

"VIL team has been working tirelessly to manage the network during these challenging times. An issue during an installation process resulted in a short disruption of services which were restored promptly," Vodafone Idea spokesperson said.

According to industry bodies, there have been around 30 per cent surge in data usage due to work-from-home amid the lockdown, while officials in the telecom department (DoT) said the rise has been about 10-15 per cent.

Airtel in its appeal for ICR had said that the arrangement will be particularly relevant where a site is shut or where the telecom operator is not able to manage the up-time and collectively ensure that the services are not interrupted.