DIALLING 'Q' FOR QUALITY

As India makes the transition to 5G at breakneck speed, the large-scale network congestion and outages resulting from it have put the scanner squarely on the quality of services

- Ashish Sinha

INDIA CONTINUES TO BE a land of paradoxes. The country’s thriving telecom sector provides a telling instance of this. Here’s how. The sector is booming, with telecom service providers scrambling to rollout 5G services across cities, towns and villages to make the promise of up to 20 gigabits per-second (gbps) peak data rates and 100-plus megabits-per-second (mbps) average data rates a reality. At the same time, however, tens of millions of telecom subscribers have to live with frequent call drops, bad network connection, sub-standard voice quality, and slow internet speeds that seem to have become the order of the day. But why must this be so? Experts say the explosive growth in data consumption fuelled by more than 850 million active internet users in the country has led to an increase in network congestion due to a ‘remarkable surge’ in mobile data traffic. Besides, infrastructure challenges and frequent fibre disruptions have also contributed to the problem, they say.

According to Prashant Singhal, Leader, Global TMT Emerging Markets at EY, the outages in the backhaul network are mainly due to cuts in the fibre network. “Cuts in fibre links cause traffic to be re-routed to already highly utilised links creating choke points and severely impact end-customer experience,” he says.