Telecom minister Kapil Sibal on Wednesday the government will take a final decision on spectrum refarming before the 2G auctions kickstart on November 12.
?Absolutely, before the auction starts,” Sibal said after inaugurating Bharti Airtel’s new network experience centre at Manesar.
The telecom commission had decided that existing mobile operators will have to fully vacate airwaves in the 900 Mhz band at the time of licence renewal in 2014, a move opposed by the GSM operators, who said it would cost them over Rs 66,000 crore in replacing infrastructure.
Airtel chairman and MD Sunil Bharti Mittal, who was excited about the network centre, said his firm has to work under the framework of the government and has complete faith in it.
The earthquake proof facility, which is the first of its kind in India, will monitor Airtel’s network performance across services? mobile, fixed line and DSL broadband, DTH, M-commerce, enterprise, international cable systems and internet peering points.
All the information collated from from its partners such as Nokia Siemens and Alcatel Lucent will then be monitored from this ‘nerve center’ . ?This facility will help us deliver more efficiently to our users as we will be able to monitor each and every point in our delivery mechanism and cut short time in trouble shooting,? Mittal said. Explaining the centre’s functionality, Sanjay Kapoor, CEO, Bharti Airtel (South Asia), said it was time-consuming and lengthy procedure to spot glitches in the network. ?Sitting here in front of the screen, one can figure out the end-to-end data experience of a customer and also the bad link in the chain,? Kapoor said.
