AirTel begins to weed out glitches

While the government is just waking up to the address the infrastructure concerns in Bangalore, the city's leading cellular service provider is not far behind in ensuring crisp and clear talktime to its subscribers.

After unleashing EDGE, a 3G technology, in Bangalore, AirTel will now go in for an underlay network where it is closely working with its partner, Ericsson.

The underlay network will allocate specific bandwidth for certain buildings and roads in Bangalore where there is maximum call traffic. These locations will then use only that particular bandwidth and not disturb external bandwidth. This initiative from AirTel is expected to significantly reduce call drops.

"As Bangalore has a very thick density and comprises many buildings within close proximity, we are wiring up those buildings and roads where call traffic is very high. We have already wired up 30-40 buildings and plan to cover nearly 100 buildings by December. In order to help subscribers who are mostly commuting on specific roads, we are also taking up a similar initiative for certain roads in the city. Antennas will be installed at lower heights on these roads to avoid call drops," Deepak Mehrotra, COO-AirTel Karnataka, said.

AirTel currently has nearly 400 towers in Bangalore and a total bandwidth of 8 MHz. This translates to allocating nearly 40 spots/channels in each tower. Since it recently crossed the one million subscriber base in Bangalore, AirTel is expecting an additional bandwidth allocation of 1.8 MHz from the government.

This is expected by October 15 and would take the total channels per tower to 49. These nine additional spots per tower would also mean that AirTel can add another 100 towers in Bangalore.

Since Bangalore accounts for 60 per cent of AirTel's Karnataka traffic, this addition will suffice till it reaches a customer base of 1.5 million.

AirTel subscribers in Bangalore have been witnessing immense call drops in the last two months. All the above mentioned initiatives should auger well for AirTel to solve this problem.

Call drops generally occur when either of the two parties in conversation are moving. A call drop occurs when a call is not properly handed over to the next tower, especially when a subscriber is moving from one location to the other. An operator is considered highly efficient when its Handover Success Rate (HSR) between two towers is 96-98 per cent.

According to Mehrotra, "During the first quarter of this fiscal, our calls put through were about 93 per cent. However, in the last four weeks, our HSR has increased to 96.8 per cent. With the implementation of underlay networking, we expect this to touch 99 per cent."

On the call drops issue, Mehrotra is pleased with progress made in the last few weeks. "In July, 95,000 subscribers faced call drops. This improved to 89,000 in August. We expect to further reduce it to 60,000 subscribers by the end of this month.

Worldwide, a 2 per cent call drop among total calls handled is considered good for GSM operators. In Bangalore, it is less than 1.5 per cent. Our efforts to fine tune our network will look at reducing it further."