airtel story

7/29/2019 Airtel Story

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Airtel story

So if there is a concern on speed, the techies immediately raise a flag that's cascaded down the sales

team to address the handset or the fixed line user. And more than reactive measures, the company

proactively does a lot of caching here too

At Bharti Airtel's swank Network Experience Centre (NEC) in Manesar, a few miles west of its

headquarters in Gurgaon, KPI is more than an acronym. Key performance indicators crop up on

those zany screens as virtual breadwinners for a company striving to make data a way of life. Here,

20-somethings crunch data to marry network KPIs, like outage rate and call drop rate with customer

dynamics, in what has come to be known across the company as Customer Experience Management.

"If you are a heavy user of data, I would like to see the kind of handset you use, your data usage in

video, websites or games, the areas you roam, the speed you get," says Jagbir Singh, Director-

Network Services Group, Bharti Airtel.

In many ways, this is the company's cockpit, from where it monitors any issue with its 190 million-odd subscribers countrywide. "The NEC sets the benchmark for telecom in South Asia and helps us

manage the layers of complex networks and technologies across our product matrix and massive

scale of operations. Essentially, we will be able to analyse and deliver a seamless experience to over

200 million customers across our verticals from one location," says Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman &

Managing Director, Bharti Airtel.

So if there is a concern on speed, the techies immediately raise a flag that's cascaded down the

sales team to address the handset or the fixed line user. And more than reactive measures, thecompany proactively does a lot of caching here too. So rather than going for each and every content

to the US, it caches the more popular homepages in its server right here. "Today, we cache around

35% of data consumption all over the country," says K Srinivas, President-Consumer Business, Bharti

Airtel.

Data from three content aggregators - Google, Akamai and LimeWire - are cached in its own server

so that as soon as the subscriber keys in a search term, the website is readily available. "It reduces

the latency and gives a better throughput," says Singh.


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Now consider how Airtel is using technology to animate myriad possibilities in its B2B domain. On

January 22, it launched the Dynamic Mobile Exchange (DME), which works on the BYOD (Bring Your

Own Device) logic. Basically, the tech allows any organisation that's a business client of Airtel, to

separate its employees' phones into two components - official and personal. So if the employee

wants to access emails, business apps like ERP or CRM, performance reviews, he can do so since it is

password-protected and has a single sign-in to access all business applications, including email. "But

the CIO fears that if the employee gets total access to office data, he may misuse it in his private

domain," says Najib Khan, CMO-Airtel Business, Bharti Airtel. So Airtel DME goes on to allay the CIO's

fear by ensuring data is secure and not allowing it to cross over from the official to the personal

domain of the employee. Data can also be erased remotely. Airtel executives are hopeful the new

product will have high traction going forward since many companies are seen breaking convention

and promoting flexi-hours, giving their employees greater freedom. Also, as the age bracket comes

down in organizations, the youth prefer all apps to be on one device. This is where BYOD can really

make a dent.

Experience matters

Be it DME or tracking a customer grouse, Airtel plays with the full gamut of technology - EDGE, 3G,

4G, wi-fi, fiber, MPLS, IPLC and many more corporate solutions. "The winners in the data space will

be the operators who will come with the best customer experience and not necessarily those who

will come with the best technology," says Sanjay Kapoor, the outgoing CEO of Bharti Airtel-India &

South Asia.

That said, from a handset, nomadic (dongle) and fixed line subscriber point of view, the range of

technologies from 2G to wi-fi is baffling. And the higher the subscriber goes in the tech curve, the

greater his fallback option. For instance, at the lowest 2G or GPRS level, if the device does not get

GPRS signals, the customer cannot fall back on a lower technology as that does not exist. But if he

uses 2.5G (EDGE), his fallback option is viably GPRS. Similarly, if he graduates to 3G, which has a peak

throughput of 21mbps, he has the option to fall back on 2.5G or EDGE and if he uses 4G with a peak

throughput of 70-80mbps, he can obviously fall back on 3G as well as the lower technologies.

Tech-tonic shift

The company already has about 140,000 2.5G Base-station Trans-receiver Systems (BTS), which are

boxes attached to telecom towers that provide bandwidth to the neighbourhood. According to

Jagbir Singh, another 10,000-odd 2.5G BTS and the fate of the EDGE network for Airtel in India will

be sealed. Singh has set up 25,000 3G sites (BTS) last year. And this is where the action will be for a

long time to come. Per megabyte offerings are not just 30-40% cheaper on 3G, it is a far more data


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efficient technology than 2.5G. But ARPUs (average revenue per user) go up significantly as the 3G

customer is a bulk user of data. Similarly, 4G is much more efficient than 3G and cost per megabyte

of data is about 70% cheaper than 3G. In FMCGspeak, it is much like buying a bigger bottle of soap.

While it may be costlier than the sachet, the consumer has far more bubbles to play with. Like

sachets, in a data-hugging world, EDGE can never match the price-value equation of either 3G or 4G.

But since 4G is still a nomadic option in limited cities as 4G devices are few and far between, Airtel's

focus is largely on deploying 3G sites.

Airtel launched its 3G services a year-and-a-half ago. Of the 42 million Airtel subscribers who access

internet on mobile, approximately 4.5 million are 3G users. Since a large chunk of subscribers still

use EDGE and GPRS, those networks will remain but all new investments would go in to beef up 3G

and 4G networks. "High speed wireless broadband has the potential to transform India, provide a

robust platform for building the country's digital economy and truly empower people," says Mittal.

Frenemy Quotient

Of course, every 'G' or generation of technology's success depends on the spectrum an operator

receives from the government through auctions. So while the cloud is yet to clear on availability of

more spectrum or the transparency of the auction process, Airtel has gone ahead knitting up

valuable tieups at every generation of technology with device manufacturers, content factories,

application providers, IT companies and systems integrators.

This has given rise to a homegrown term-'Frenemies'-that Kapoor flaunts quite unabashedly. "We

compete as well as collaborate with our partners," he points out. For instance, while Apple

collaborates with Airtel on its iPhone devices offering Airtel services and data plan, the two

companies compete over apps on their respective app stores.

Friends or enemies, it is an ecosystem of partnerships that is enabling the company to stay ahead of

the curve by notching up consumers. "Airtel works with OEMs to make customer on-boarding

simpler and innovations help improve customer experience... so it is clearly not waiting for a device

ecosystem to develop," says Neeraj Aggarwal, Partner & Director, BCG. He adds that with

incremental technologies, Airtel does not want to be a mere pipe or access provider but take the

digitization theme forward covering the entire gamut of data usage.


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Walk the talk

In doing so, Airtel had to ensure it was organizationally ready for data influx. "We had to change the

look and feel of the organization from a vertical orientation of mobile, fixed line, broadband and DTHdivision to just B2C and B2B divisions....we became consumer rather than technologyfacing,"

explains Kapoor. That was important as data is seamless and goes through various technology

transfers.

Internally, the operator devised a 3D strategy - demystifying data and devices, which comprised an

e-learning certification module, a classroom training programme for the 4,500-odd salesforce and

niche specialized courses for folks in the B2B space. "We have a Twitter handle with over a thousand

members, which we use to discuss cutting-edge tech. Once in 2-3 weeks, people across the industry

come down and deliver a talk and every office has a Data Experience Zone where employees come

and spend time with the available devices," says Dipak Roy, Head-HR, Consumer Business

Operations, Bharti Airtel, adding that the route his company has chosen calls for all its 15,000-odd

employees to live their lives in the data world.

Moreover, standard HR practices, like reverse mentoring is taken seriously across the organisation.

In 2008, Kapoor's then 22-year-old reverse mentor, Amit Singh, introduced him to Manchester

United and F1. Later, Airtel tied up with both sport bodies to shore up its youth quotient. Kapoor

claims that the youth has sparked many innovations across the company, such as SmartByte, or

bandwidth on demand, and data plan sharing.

Staying at innovations, the bulk of marketing thrust at Airtel's consumer arm is now on gauging

solutions for connections that provide near about 100mbps speed. The 4G consumer, growing at

78% a month, is a heavy video user. So a whole host of video on demand and security solutions are

being mulled over. "You can install a camera at home and configure a certain time or any movement

in it and it automatically captures the visuals on your mobile as an app," says Srinivas, offering a

sneak peek into tomorrow's services.

Business as unsual


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Aggression in the consumer-facing business of Airtel is echoed across its business division too. The

company's B2B arm straddles three main divisions-global wholesale business, the enterprise and

government business (EGB) and small and medium businesses (SMBs). While the first one deals with

buying and selling of high capacity bandwidth accounting for, say, 3% of the business revenues, EGB

can stake claim to nearly 70% of the business pie, while SMB's account for the remaining 27%.

Increasingly, corporate clients are showing an affinity for cloud services. "Top corporates are

demanding to move to cloud, at least the non-critical part of their data, like emails, video

conferencing, audio conferencing," says Najib Khan. With real estate prices hardening, it is no more

feasible for companies to keep buying servers. Simply put, they are looking at a pay per use model,

instead of maintaining their own data centres. This is where the managed services of Airtel peak as

the company hosts all data needs of its clients across its seven data centres countrywide.

Yet another area is location-based service. The company has two products already in this space-

TrackMATE and TraceMATEto facilitate mobile enablement of tracking assets and tracing people. It is

a promising category since it is linked to performance.

However, the most interesting division in the company's tech space seems to be the M2M, or

machine-to-machine, vertical. It is work in progress and company executives are loath to talk about

it. By all accounts, the team working on this part of the business is rather small at this point of time.

But this is it-high potential, high value, and definitely, higher bang for the buck. Simply put, it is

about machines interfacing with other machines to make life easier. For instance, it is possible for

intelligent cars to communicate with the server at the owner's insurance company directly and feed

in his driving history and auto records to make the system more transparent and seamless. Again, a

SIM card inserted in a chipset tied around the arm of a patient can transmit his health vital stats to

the doctor in real time. "M2M as a category holds promise in industries where reading can be

automated, and nowadays, virtually every industry is automated," says Benoy CS, Director-ICT

Practice, Frost & Sullivan.

The deeper one dives into data, greater the linkages between innovation and collaboration. So far,

Bharti Airtel has done well to recognize the twin pillars of data. It has even reoriented its

organizational structure to become a data-facing enterprise. It's now up to the 200-odd data

devotees at the company's Network Experience Centre to connect the dots and ensure Airtel's data

quest is more than a pipe dream.


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Happy Returns: The tax collection of Chennai Corporation goes digital

CHENNAI CORPORATION has 25 municipal wards all across Tamil Nadu. The primary responsibility of

these wards is Property Tax Collection of 6.25 lakh residential and commercial properties. NowAirtel's Blackberry-based solution is helping Chennai Corporation to collect tax with minimal

documentation. So bill collectors need not carry a bag of documents anymore. Data is uploaded to

the main server immediately and the taxpayers get to know details of their arrears instantaneously.

This has also helped bring down the queues at the payment counters at the zonal offices. Tax

collectors equipped with BlackBerry and small Bluetooth printer capture real time information on

outstanding arrears customer-wise. Tax collectors accept payment either by cash or cheque/DD.

FOR CHENNAI Corporation, updating a transaction now takes about 3-4 minutes instead of a

fortnight, discrepancy in tax computation has been reduced following reduced multiple manual

entries, there are reduced queues at counters of the Corporation office and zero backlog in updating

records.

Keeping Track: How an Airtel innovation is helping Orissa's buses buzz

BHARTI AIRTEL has developed and deployed satellite-based vehicle tracking system and fuel

monitoring system for Orissa State Road Transport Corporation (OSRTC). The integrated tracking

solution is equipped with TrackMATE, combining Wireless Communication (GSM/GPRS), Global

Positioning System (GPS) along with Fuel Monitoring System (FMS). The system allows OSRTC to

track required data while the bus is on the move or stationary. The application will capture the

coordinates from the satellite and will route the information to the control center via Airtel's

GSM/GPRS network. The common server can be accessed from anywhere in the world with

authenticated loginbased access.

THE FUEL tank of these buses has been installed with sensors which will allow OSRTC to keep track

of fuel consumption and control pilferage. The pilot completion and implementation of VTS and FMS

includes 50 buses within Orissa.

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