Vodafone India, the country’s second largest mobile operator by subscriber and revenues, is beefing up its networks as it aims to cut instances of call drops, improve services as well as roll out 4G services before end of the current fiscal. The company has set up war rooms to address network issues and call drops in Delhi and has moved in technical staff from its other circles across the country, Sunil Sood, managing director & CEO, Vodafone India, told FE’s R Jaikrishna in an interview. Excerpts:

What made call drops a national issue, and what is Vodafone India doing about it, especially with the penalty clause?  
There are various things because of which call drops are caused. The big issue is in Delhi. Our licences came up for renewal after 20-years, we need to do spectrum optimisation, which typically takes 1-1.5-years. The amount of band, the active municipality shutting down sites, and radiation. We also had the issue of our frequencies interfering with that of CDMA, resulting in call drops and we have put in 1600 filters. Trai has conducted drive tests in Delhi in the same routes.  There has been a substantial improvement in call drops. At the end of October it was in the range of 1.32% to 2.97%, declining from the 1.53% to 6.6% at end of August.

Can you elaborate more on Vodafone India’s strategy to reduce the call drops instances in Delhi?
In Delhi, we have formed war rooms and mapped the city into grid of one square kilometres. We have moved in people from other circles, and assigned them in fixing up a smaller area in terms of coverage. Every day we are putting up 2-3 sites. In the last one month, we have added 160 sites in Delhi, and 730 sites in the last six months.  We expect that 490 sites needs to be required to be fixed, including 200 sites which were shut down, and the rest is additional new sites. In terms of capex, we have spend R500 crore between April and November. The minister for communications and information technology has talked to urban development ministry. There is a meeting with NDMC (New Delhi Municipal Council), which will allow us to use government buildings for putting up sites. I think we are in the last stages of finalisation.

What are your plans on spectrum trading? To reduce call drops you either need more spectrum or more sites. What are your views on that.
We are open to getting spectrum as long as the business case is right. We are willing to get spectrum either through sharing, trading or auctions. We require more spectrum in a country like our’s.  It’s the quantum of spectrum and value of spectrum that is important. We would love to have large quantities of spectrum at reasonable prices.

What is the capex for the fiscal and how much have you spent until now?    
We have said we would spend R8000 crore this fiscal and until September spent R3,627 crore.