A software bug leaves over 150,000 cellular subscribers stranded without a network for seven-odd hours and shows that public sector service provider or private sector one, some things never change.

By Ashutosh Sinha

Denial is a universal corporate phenomenon. Just how ubiquitous became evident on the days following March 16. In many ways, the Friday that came a day after the Ides of March was special: if there was a payment crisis on the Bombay Stock Exchange, this was the day on which it would rear its ugly head; and Armsgate was just about 70 hours old and still rocking the political establishment, and how.

And on March 16, the network wasn't the computer for Airtel's customers in Delhi. It was simply down. d-o-w-n. For a little over seven hours, from 2:30 pm in the afternoon to 10:00 pm at night, between 40 per cent and 50 per cent of Airtel's 320,000 subscribers in Delhi was left holding phones that displayed an innocuous searching-for-network error message.

An official media release issued by the company later that same evening explained that the network would soon be up, but was curiously devoid of any details about the exact nature of the problem: ''We regret the inconvenience that may have been caused to some of our customers. The experts from Ericsson along with our technical teams are working on a war footing to rectify the problem and we expect the service to be fully functional in a very short time.''

Although an Airtel spokesperson did explain the exact nature of the problem to journalists who called the company, it didn't take long for the company to go into denial mode. No advertisements were taken out in the papers apologising for the breakdown; no messages were sent out using SMS (Smart Messaging Service) by a company that normally used the medium to remind customers about unpaid bills or SPAM them with ads; and a senior executive of the company who spoke to this correspondent explained that Airtel couldn't promise zero-downtime as it wasn't in control of the network end-to-end-a feeble and utterly-out-of-context strike at the interconnect regime.

Worse, the regulator TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India), an organi- sation not normally known for its reticence in matters related to telecomm- unications, chose not to comment on the issue.

The Tech Perspective

There is, as one would expect there to be, a rational reason for the network's breakdown. In the words of Airtel's Chief Technology Officer (CTO) K. Vijayaraghavan: ''The problem was in the software. This affected the main switch, and, in turn, the home location register (which identifies the location of the subscriber in real-time).''

There's nothing unusual about a software bug causing a network to collapse. As an executive of a rival cellular network puts it: ''Seven times out of ten, a human error causes a network to go down. The other three times, the breakdown can be attributed to software or other things.''

Downtime isn't unusual in the Indian cellular telephony business. ''A down-time of 2-3 hours is forgivable,'' explains Amitabh Mukhopadhyay, the CTO of Fascel, a company that provides cellular services in Gujarat. And building redundancy in the form of excess switching capacity will not help a company escape disruptions that have been caused by software bugs.

Whether companies have adequate redundancy to handle switch-related glitches is another issue altogether. Most cellular service providers have striven to increase their subscription base, without making incremental investments in infrastructure and it is likely that there is little built-in redundancy in cellular networks across India.

Purely from the software point of view, breakdowns like the one that happened on March 16 are unavoidable. Says Ranjivjit Singh, Director, Ericsson India: ''Yes, such a bug does strike. And the network does go down. However, once such a thing happens, the software patch is shared with all the Ericsson networks around the world so that it does not happen again.'' That must be a reassuring feeling for the equipment vendor; it means little to customers who had to spend eight hours with orphaned cellular phones.

The Economic Perspective

Typical purchase-and-maintenance agreements provide for the penalisation of the equipment supplier in case of a breakdown. ''Telecom service companies have an agreement with equipment vendors, which mandates a mean time to repair (MTTR). If a network is down for too long, it could be considered deficiency of service,'' explains a lawyer who advises several telcos. In effect, the equipment vendor will pay a sum of money to the service provider if the network goes down. Airtel's CEO Sanjay Kapoor refuses to comment on whether his company has such an agreement with Ericsson but insists that ''we are not getting any money from the infrastructure provider in this case''.

That's at the company's end. But consumers (read cellular subscribers), avers Manish Mohan, a Supreme Court lawyer, can opt for legal recourse: ''The delay in restoring the service certainly constitutes a deficiency under the Consumer Protection Act.''

It was to adjudicate over incidents like the March 16 malfunction that TRAI released, in July 2000, regulations governing the quality of service that cellular telephony companies have to provide. ''TRAI has rules on the quality of service, but it has no follow-up mechanism. We think companies should be levied a penalty in case of network downtime,'' says Sriram Khanna of Voice, a Delhi-based consumer rights organisation that works closely with the regulator. Enforcement may not be such a bad idea: one would expect private sector telecom companies to display far more customer-orientation than public sector monopolies, but if they do not, then the regulator must do something about it.

The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), wouldn't like the regulator to enforce quality norms. Indeed, it wouldn't even like TRAI to define quality standards. ''Market forces should decide the quality of service,'' remarks T.V. Ramachandran, the association's Director-General. ''Competition will ensure that standards are maintained.'' May be, but we'll settle for an apology and a refund for now.

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