Airtel’s new priority plan under Centre’s lens

The Centre and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) are examining Bharti Airtel’s new service that the company says offers a superior network experience to postpaid consumers, people aware of the details told ET.

The authorities are checking whether this complies with net neutrality norms and are seeking to ensure that prepaid consumers don’t face any deterioration in service quality due to the priority given to post-paid users.

“Communications minister Jyotiraditya Scindia has already held a meeting with officials on the service,” said one of the persons cited above. “The regulator will be examining the service in detail and may ask the company to provide any technical details.”

The person said Airtel may be asked to demonstrate how slicing of the network has been done to better understand the technology behind the new service.

Airtel Tuesday announced the new service, which it claimed would offer superior and more consistent network experience to postpaid users by leveraging network slicing technology offered by standalone 5G architecture which the company is currently rolling out across India.

People privy to the development said Airtel’s rigorous internal testing done over weeks has shown that the 5G slicing technology improves the overall network experience of all users – pre and postpaid. “In congested areas, those on all postpaid plans will continue to have stable connection…but everyone else’s experience will be what it was before,” said the person.

Airtel is engaged with the authorities regarding the service.

The priority service is being targeted at Airtel’s postpaid user base, comprising about 7.75% of its 373 million mobile users in the country. Airtel didn’t respond to a request for comment.

India currently doesn’t have specific rules around network slicing. While Trai in September 2020 recommended certain traffic management practices (TMPs) for telecom networks that could be undertaken within the net neutrality norms, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has yet to notify them. Adoption of TMPs could have provided clarity around traffic management, including slicing.

The recommendations on TMPs were clear that there shouldn’t be any discrimination or prioritisation of internet traffic and that telcos should inform consumers in a transparent manner about any kind of traffic management they are adopting.

After the launch of 5G services in October 2022, telecom operators had written to Trai to clarify whether slicing-based plans violate the regulations but didn’t get any clarity. The telecom regulator, in a public discussion this February, said it would take a wait-and-watch stance to see how telcos use network slicing for consumer offerings.

In the absence of any rules, Airtel has rolled out the new priority service using slicing, wherein a section of the network has been allocated to postpaid consumers. Experts said as postpaid consumers pay much higher, this is a bid by the company to improve revenue realisation. Through the new service, Airtel is aiming to lure more pre-paid users to switch to postpaid, experts added.

As part of the slicing feature of 5G technology, multiple virtual networks can be carved out in a single physical network. The company is believed to have tested the network internally before commercially rolling out the service and found that throughput of the network has become better.

Majority of the stakeholders including network vendors and internet activists feel that Airtel’s service is not violating net neutrality norms.

While slicing has been implemented in markets like the US, UK, and Singapore, it is being done for the first time in India for mobile consumers. Reliance Jio is believed to be utilising the technology for serving its fixed wireless access (FWA) consumers but there is no segregation of mobile consumers.

Airtel’s priority service has however faced some social media backlash regarding its overall quality of service. The government as well as Trai has been taking tough measures to improve telecom services and tightening norms around quality of service in a bid to ease traffic congestion and call drops.