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By Jiang Fuyou

India is the second largest mobile communications and CDMA market in the world. A vast market and more than ten operators make a highly competitive environment. Tata Indicom, one of the leading CDMA operators in the country, has witnessed an astounding subscriber growth rate of around 40 times within the past four years. 


Success secrets 

Tata had been looking for reliable and effective strategic partners to construct a refined network, but it proved to be a rocky road. 

Two Western equipment suppliers were initially selected for network construction before 2006. One supplier quit the CDMA field soon afterwards. The other failed to support future evolution and its outdated products incurred high OPEX, hindering Tata' s effort to provide better services. In addition, the legacy network could not support IP transformation, and its TDM network was complicated in networking and lacked transport efficiency. 

In 2007, Tata looked for a customer-oriented supplier with powerful delivery capability, to help modernize its CDMA network. Huawei' s strong capability impressed Tata much, however, high credentials were not enough to win Tata' s trust. Wang Hu, a network planning specialist at Huawei, still remembers the arduous efforts made during the period to gain their confidence.

• The young, beardless expert 
  
  Having been involved in CDMA operations for more than 10 years, Tata has a lot of technical experts, who are quite confident in their ability in network planning and optimization. 
  
  Wang Hu, a senior manager at Huawei, when first wanted to confer with Tata' s experts on network planning and optimization, he was not taken seriously. 
  
  One day, Wang met an Indian colleague at the dining hall and was asked whether he just graduated from college and was still single. He soon learned that he was considered a youngster because he did not have a beard. In India, there is a tendency to consider professionals sporting a white beard as academics and highly experienced resources. A beardless "youngster" like Wang felt this could be one of the reasons for Tata not to take him seriously. 
  
  An American employee of Huawei, who once worked in a U.S. network optimization company, had come to India for technical support. Wang took the American colleague to Tata and asked for an appointment. Tata recognized the American as an expert from the United States, the birthplace of CDMA technology, and quickly gave them an appointment. 
  
  The technical meeting was an unforgettable experience for Wang. On that day, fifty people packed into a meeting room designed for twenty. The American expert gave a detailed introduction of Huawei and then Wang began talking about network planning and network optimization. 
  
  He introduced GENEX, a network planning and optimization tool developed by Huawei. It surprised the senior, bearded specialists that such a simple tool could simulate complicated wireless environments. One of the participants selected an Indian city for an on-site demo, and the calculation result was 11.4, rounded up to 12. Tata' s specialists smiled with satisfaction–the figure was exactly the number of existing BTSs in the city. 
  
  GENEX was developed with the coordinated efforts of thousands of Huawei' s network planning and optimization engineers, including many Indians. When it came time to simulate other scenarios, the results were uniformly correct. 
  
  Upon signing the contract, Tata especially expressed interest to buy a dozen sets of GENEXs. A network optimization expert from Tata told Wang that in the past, they had many problems configuring adjacent cells in network optimization and such problems led to handover failures, even dropped calls. With GENEX, Tata' s network optimization engineers can now easily complete configurations according to the simulation result.

• The Mumbai commitment 
  
  Mumbai, with more than 20 million people, is the largest city in India and the financial and entertainment center. It is also one of the most crowded in the world, with 30,000 people living in each square kilometer. Building a network in this environment is not easy. Tata decided to select the equipment supplier with the best delivery quality for its new Mumbai project. It signed an agreement with Huawei and another vendor, with a clause that the equipment supplier that had the best network quality in Delhi, Calcutta or Chennai (three metropolitan cities in India) would be chosen for the project in Mumbai. 
  
  Huawei started implementing the project in Delhi and Calcutta, the second and third most populous cities in India. The networking was very complicated and the project involved swapping thousands of BTSs. 
  
  In Calcutta, as Tata had no redundant frequency channel for testing, all authentication tests before cutover had to be done at night and the commercial network needed to be recovered before dawn. For more than two months, Huawei' s field engineers worked all night long. 
  
  The most challenging period was during the monsoon season in August and September. Equipment rooms in low-lying areas were always flooded. To ensure normal network operations and handle emergencies, field engineers were on 24-hour standby. 
  
  In late 2007, an independent organization, Zest, evaluated network quality and stated that Huawei' s network quality was outstanding. The coverage and communications quality of the Calcutta network built by Huawei was the best among all networks in the city and all Tata CDMA networks. The Delhi network also got good marks. 
  
  Tata honored the commitment for the Mumbai network and it has already been commercialized, doing quite well in independent network quality reviews by Phi Metrics in 2008. 
  
  So far, Tata has finished network modernization in all major Indian cities and leads the race for network quality among all mobile operators. In 2008, Tata had more than 1 million new subscribers each month for six consecutive months.

• Happiness from "swapping" 
  
  Tata launched a "Tata to All" promotion–a subscriber can pay 475 rupees (9.50 USD) for 1,000 minutes of local calls and 500 free text messages. With this package, the tariff for voice calls is less than 0.01 USD per minute. 
  
  How could Tata afford such a low rate? Daniel Jiang, Huawei' s product manager for Tata projects, explained how they could offer such low priced service packages. 
  
  In the spring of 2007, the swapping project began in Delhi and Calcutta. In the Delhi metropolitan area, Huawei used a new-generation BSC with 8 cabinets to replace the previous BSC with 109 cabinets. The equipment room was almost empty after the swap. Looking at the equipment room, a Tata engineer joked that there was enough space to host a party and "We can enjoy happiness from swapping". 
  
  Delhi was merely the prelude for a huge swap. Huawei gradually swapped nearly 4,000 BTSs, with annual savings of more than 44 million USD for Tata in terms of rents, power consumption, and OPEX.

Going for the gold 

In the mobile communications market in India, Tata has a reputation of being innovative. It makes use of the outstanding data service capability of the CDMA network to provide various applications, including music, games and ring back tones (RBTs). In the binary runtime environment for wireless (BREW), it provides more than 900 data services. The BREW showed the huge potential of data services to Tata. In 2007, they processed more than 30 million BREW application downloads and data services contributed more than 10% to Tata' s overall wireless and mobile revenue. 

The High Speed Internet Access (HSIA) technology is getting mature and terminals are more and more diversified, so Tata decided to construct an HSIA network to take the lead in the explosive Indian mobile Internet market. 

Tata and Huawei together, tested an overlapped HSIA system in the CDMA2000 1X network in Delhi. The test proved that the uplink and downlink rates and the connection quality satisfied the requirements for commercial applications. Moreover, Huawei' s HSIA solution supports flexible charging, including charging by content, and an end-to-end QoS guarantee, which facilitates HSIA operations. 

After testing, Tata accelerated the HSIA network construction and signed a contract with Huawei to deploy HSIA networks in Mumbai, Delhi and Calcutta. Huawei' s existing BTSs can support HSIA through board addition and software upgrades, and network construction was carried out quickly. At present, the HSIA network in Mumbai has been commercially launched, and attracted more than 100,000 subscribers within 3 months. Enjoying rich experience in data service operations, Tata is definitely "going for the gold medal". 


Importance of modesty 

In Tata' s corporate introduction, a quote from Lao Tse, a philosopher of ancient China and a central figure in Taoism, was used to explain the company' s idea about corporate sustainability. "Clay is molded to make a vessel, the utility of that vessel lies in 'what is not' . Thus by taking advantage of what is not, we develop 'what is' ." This quote expresses Tata' s principle of remaining modest, understanding and tolerant to continuously improve and sustain development. 

Following this principle, Tata has gained a good understanding of subscribers. According to a recent mobile subscriber satisfaction survey conducted by Voice & Data, a leading telecom magazine in India, Tata was the number one mobile telecom service provider in India. 

Customer satisfaction is earned from attention to many different aspects of the user experience, no matter how small and seemingly insignificant. For example, on Tata' s website, there is a small button on the toolbar, enabling the subscriber to adjust the sizes of fonts on the web page. This is a handy function for anyone that does not like squinting at small print. By putting itself in the subscribers' shoes and fine attention to details, Tata has won the hearts of millions of subscribers.




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