After mishaps, Bharti faces host of questions

Airtel has bad news to reckon with ahead of the earnings season.

The fire that broke out at its data centre in Malad on Wednesday, disrupting services for around 36 lakh customers in Mumbai, is estimated to have cost it Rs4 crore a day — that’s Rs12 crore for the last three days, and counting.

It is not yet known how much the company will have to pay its high value clients as compensation.

This is the third time Airtel’s services have been disrupted in recent times — services in Delhi were hit four months back; in Mumbai, a fire had broken out in July 2008 at its Peninsula Tower office (incidentally, the company had taken a month to rectify the issue at that time).

Customers see a serious contradiction in Airtel’s claims of offering the best customer service, with tweets flaying its ‘apathy’ — a more becoming term in this context.

“The outage in Delhi four months ago, poor quality services and moreover frequency in Airtel’s network disruptions, are things that Airtel must recognise if it wants to retain its image as a trustworthy brand,” said Kunal Bajaj, director - India at global telecom research and consultancy firm, Analysys Mason.

The recurring problem also shows that the back-up systems that Airtel claims to have set up have failed to kick in.

“More than revenues, the bigger issue here is why didn’t the redundancy mechanism that is precisely installed for emergency situations such as these not kick in? This shows serious design flaws, that the company urgently needs to look into,” said Kamlesh Bhatia, research director at Gartner.  

“The other question is, what is the company doing to compensate customers, especially those for whom essential services disruption has meant a huge loss in business? So far, the company has not mentioned anything about compensation, and although this may not be a cause for customers to switch networks, these recurring incidents will no doubt have an impact on their overall customer experience and satisfaction provided,” said Bhatia.

To be sure, two days after the fire, the company has been able to restore services only partially. BlackBerry and other data services such as 3G, GPRS and CDMA services are still not fully functional, though voice calling has been largely restored, barring remote areas, according to an Airtel official.

On Friday, many users complained of intermittent breaks in service, with the network going flat several times during the day.

Said an exasperated Ameya Dalvi, “On Wednesday, I woke up to zero signal, with Airtel promising to restore services by evening. However, on Thursday, I was still unable to make outgoing calls or send SMSes. On Friday, for some time in the afternoon, again I had no network. I am not sure when the signal will go off.”

While this could be attributed to signal testing and recovery by the company, it is intriguing that Airtel has still not been able to identify the source of the fire.

“All mobile, DSL (digital subscriber line) and mobile data services have largely normalised. However, some customers may be facing intermittent network congestion in some legs during the network stabilisation process. We continue to work on our enterprise services delivery, which will start normalising soon,” the company said in a statement. It even took out advertisements to this effect.

However, company officials could not say for sure when the services would be fully restored though they were “working night and day.”