A.K. Arora says that telecom has always been his dream. From childhood, he has been attached to gadhood, he has been attached to gadgets and electronics. After graduating, he was lucky enough to embark on his career at a time when the realisation was dawning in India that it needed to develop telecom. The country’s telecom networks were clogged and a call from Delhi to anywhere else was a nightmare of aural fog, full of crackling and straining to catch faint, distant voices.
Then digital telecom exchanges came in and C-DOT exchanges were introduced in rural areas through telecom visionary Sam Pitroda’s pioneering efforts. After that, the whole scenario changed. From 1996, when the mobile first appeared on the scene, there has been no looking back.
Arora chose telecom as his career because at that time the only choice available to engineering graduates was the railways or telecom. “It was my hunch at the time that telecom was going to be a big need, and so I chose it rather than the railways,” he says.
His current challenge as executive director lies in dealing with the competition in Delhi. Mobile teledensity has been increasing and even though there are other big telecom players, MTNL is still the biggest among them in the capital with about 2.75 million customers, of which 1.55 million are landline customers, about 1.1 million are mobile customers and 70,000 are CDMA subscribers.
“Maintaining our leadership position ahead of the other five operators in Delhi is my biggest challenge. We are expanding our areas of operation. We were the first operator in the capital to introduce broadband services in 2005, and today our broadband network is the best in Delhi. We have about 190,000 customers and are issuing 500 fresh connections daily,” he says.
MTNL recently upgraded all broadband speeds to 2 Mbps, which Arora says is essential. “You see, broadband is nothing but a value-added service of a landline. So, along with broadband, we are giving another value-added service, namely, IPTV, which we have already launched. We have got 500 connections working already and by March, we propose to increase this number by 20,000.”
IPTV provides broadband customers with a cost-effective alternative for the new conditional access system in the capital. “Earlier, customers had data requirements, which we catered to by providing broadband via the landline. Now, their `big’ data requirement or video requirement is being catered to via mobility.”
There is also 3G coming, for which MTNL has ordered the necessary equipment. Wi-Max will also be important, facilitating wireless access to broadband.Trials for the Wi-Max service are already under way. Arora says that MTNL is also extending its fibre to the building and fibre to the home, using gigabit passive optical network technology to provide bandwidth anywhere in Delhi on fibre.
“My concern is the need to improve customer interface. For this, we have recently commissioned a 300-seat call centre to provide services to landline, broadband, CDMA and GSM mobile customers. We have provided a single-window grievance redressal unit in our customer care centres which we call `Sanchar Haats’.We are also commissioning a Rs 2.5 billion convergent billing system to provide a single bill for all the services with any level of detail a customer may like to have, from next April,” he says.
Arora is not daunted by competition, even though MTNL’s rivals too are launching IPTV, for example. “We were the forerunners. In fact, to cite another example, MPEG 4, a technology that is being used in a few countries only, is something we are pioneering,” he says.
MTNL’s strength is its huge telecom infrastructure consisting of a copper cable network which has been extended to every corner of the city, 301 state-of-the-art landline exchanges, 184 broadband nodes, more than 500 DLCs, 6,000 km of OFC network and the capability to provide any type of telecom service to individual and corporate customers.
“Our strength also lies in our 20,000-strong trained and experienced technicians and engineers. We believe that our customers are loyal because we are known for reliability and transparency,” says Arora.
A 1970 graduate from IIT Roorkee, Arora also did his master’s in engineering from the same institution.He was a gold medallist at the Roorkee University. In the Uttar Pradesh Examination Board ?? the biggest examination-conducting board in Asia ?? he was ranked third.
Arora is an officer of the ITS Group A service. A member of the 1972 batch, he started his career in the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) in Mandi in Himachal Pradesh.
Over the past 32 years, he has worked in all areas of telecom and telecom technologies. He spent seven years, from 1981 to 1988, as director at the Advanced Level Training Centre in Ghaziabad and three years as director, staff at DoT’s headquarters at Sanchar Bhavan in New Delhi.
In his diverse career, he has worked as principal general manager in BSNL’s Maharashtra Telecom Circle in Mumbai and successfully planned and implemented the CDMA network. He was also chief general manager in the same circle, responsible for BSNL’s long distance network, and chief general manager in Patna in 2004.
His Patna posting was his most satisfying assignment. He was able to contribute effectively to improving and enhancing the telecom facilities in Bihar at a time when they were desperately needed, given that the state had the lowest teledensity of 2-3 per cent in the country.
Arora was responsible for installing new exchanges in the rural areas, supplementing them with a CDMA network, providing fibre connectivity, and installing a strong 534 BTS mobile network from Nortel Technologies. This changed the entire complexion of BSNL’s network. Broadband services were also introduced.
Arora has been executive director since August 2005. He is in charge of landline, CDMA-related activities, broadband, and leased line circuits. While proud of the company’s infrastructure and people, he feels that the portion of the company’s total revenue that is spent on staff (36 per cent) is too high and needs to be reduced. “In the years to come, while we develop our activities, this shortcoming will be taken care of; 36 per is a sizeable chunk and obviously pushes profits down. Other companies show a higher profit.”
Arora’s own strength is his positive attitude towards life. “There are two kinds of people. People who want to work and those who do not want to work. I have always had the habit of working very hard and this has been a permanent feature of my life. I lost my father at a very young age, so I think that inspired me to work hard and give my best to everything I undertake. My weakness is that if anyone comes to me with a request, I can’t turn them away or say no to them, and once I’ve committed myself, I want to keep my word.”
For leisure, Arora enjoys being with his wife and two children. On Sundays, he refuses to go out, preferring to listen to music, Mukesh in particular.”Broadband is nothing but a value-added service of a landline. So, along with broadband, we are giving another value-added service, namely, IPTV, which we have already launched.”
