Putting $3-4 billion annually on networks, to reduce call drops: Sunil Mittal, Bharti Airtel

In a chat with ET Now, Sunil Mittal, Executive Chairman of Bharti Airtel, shares his thoughts on the issue of call drops. Excerpts:

ET Now: The issue of call drops has been gaining traction over the past few months. What are your thoughts on the same?
Sunil Mittal: We all need to be concerned about the issue of call drops. This country has not had major problems around call drops for the last 20 years or so. Radio networks inherently will have a few call drops but they should be within the norm. It has been a tough ride for nearly a year now.

A lot of issues have taken place, including the irrational and unfounded fears of radiation leading to towers coming off. The MCDs and certain municipalities are demanding extraordinary amounts of money from telecom tower companies and that has led to difficulties.

Finally, the entire process of taking the spectrum back, re-auctioning it, reassigning frequencies etc has led to disruptions. Having said that, all of us are focused towards fixing this problem and we are determined to move forward and we are seeing progress week by week.

ET Now: Whe it comes to the nature of the quality of services in the past, you have said that that is an area you are looking at very closely. How important is it for a teleco to look inwards and ensure that the quality of services is top-notch so that the customer does not suffer?

Sunil Mittal: Look at the investments telecom companies are making. My own company has put in over $13 billion in the purchase of spectrum. We are putting in $3 billion to $4 billion every year on networks. Would we not want to have better quality? Would we want to lose our customers to someone else? Would we want our brand to suffer? Day and night we are focused on providing better quality.