Airtel to cover entire country soon

Shirajiv Sirimane

The fifth mobile operator, Airtel which commenced operations last month has invested over US $ 100 million for their operations so far. The company would invest a further US $ 100 million within the next three years.

Executive Director, Airtel, K. Srinivas said that they are currently covering 60 percent of the addressable population. “Soon we will be covering the entire population excluding small pockets in the North and East due to security concerns,” he said.

Airtel would need a further 400 to 500 towers to cover the entire country. “Daily we are adding new towns and Matara was the last town to be covered. Nuwara Eliya will be the next Airtel coverage point,” he said.

Srinivas said that Airtel is very happy with the response they received from the Sri Lankan public. “This is definitely more than what we bargained for,” he said.

He also emphasized that they have no intention of raising their tariff and would maintain the Rs. 2 outgoing charge subject to approvals from the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRC). He said that they are used to competition and ready to face it as long as it is fair. “However we see some gray areas in Sri Lanka as subscribers are experiencing problems as other operators are not cooperating,” he said.

“While Airtel has in fact commissioned all infrastructure required to cater to this overwhelming response, it has to also depend on existing operators to provide seamless inter-connectivity between networks as the last lap in serving the customer.

The creation of adequate interconnection capacity, for this purpose, has been denied so far and this has now become the most critical block against bringing a world class, affordable mobile telecom service to all Sri Lankans.

In the latest move taken by telecommunications operators, the Sri Lankan public at large has been denied the opportunity of fully experiencing the services of the newest entrant to the mobile market.

These include the provision of required capacity at other operator network as well as provision of physical access to infrastructure up-gradation at their locations. These two activities are fundamental obligations of a service provider in the interest of providing customer welfare, but other operators have not paid any heed to this” he said.

Currently, Airtel customers are experiencing call congestion when calling other networks, requiring them to make multiple attempts to make a successful call. However there is no congestion for calls made from Airtel to Airtel at any time.

Call congestion from Airtel to other operators is experienced at busy hours and only 30 per cent of calls are successfully completed. This is due to operators, on average, only providing less than 50 per cent of required capacity despite planned forecasts and repeated reminders forwarded by Airtel to them.

These requests have either gone unanswered or have been provided at an unacceptably slow pace. This behaviour will result in even higher congestion between Airtel and other networks during busy hours, inevitably leading to poor call quality.

“It is therefore the public at large who will suffer. Prudence would have it that those operators not hold the public to ransom through their anti competitor actions, which will only create greater burden on customers of all networks” he added.

He also said that while adding more value added services they are not looking at introducing Television or CDMA immediately.