Vodafone Idea Advisory

Vodafone Idea’s pan India telecom network reaches over 1.1 bn Indians. During the current lockdown due to Corona pandemic, connectivity is the most important service for people to connect with their loved ones and work from home. Our engineers are working tirelessly over the last few weeks to support millions of customers to stay safe at home by ensuring Vodafone Idea’s 4G+ network availability.

A comprehensive pandemic response plan with requisite risk mitigation protocols has been activated while ensuring continuity of mission critical processes for keeping our networks working as telecom is an essential service.

Our Business Continuity Plans are being diligently reviewed across all operations. Our flagship Super NOC, located in Pune and Hyderabad, is the nerve center of all 22 circles with centralized monitoring and control of our Network, and also ensures business continuity with geo-redundancy. All our enterprise services also continue to be monitored through our SNOC to ensure business continuity.

We have set up virtual war rooms where key team members are participating through Concalls and VCs. Senior team members from operations / circles / SNOC and partners are continuously on call with field to ensure uptime and operational continuity.

We are continuously monitoring the traffic pattern and confident of handling the growing demand of voice and data services during the lockdown period.

Our 12000+ ma-MIMOs (by far the largest deployment in the country) across key markets are substantially helping in managing the traffic spike. We are deploying capacities across using all means including addition of COW sites wherever appropriate. We have also requested DOT to clear our pending applications for spectrum allocation. We are hopeful that DoT would expedite our spectrum liberalization requests and regularize our backhaul spectrum.

The Govt realizes the critical role of telecom services during this crisis and is taking necessary steps to enable smooth functioning of telecom operations.

At VIL, the health and safety of our employees remains our first priority. While majority of the team members have been enabled to work from home, we are operating certain critical facilities with scant staff to enable undisrupted services to our customers 24X7, as per Govt orders of operating essential services.

We have organised temporary stay arrangement at our data centre locations, made food and groceries available at critical locations and providing vehicle on duty to facilitate movement of technical staff to sites.

Our engineers are working in the field with utmost care by following the social distancing protocols.

Other Examples:

·         Daily briefings on Safety, Social distancing to all field and non-field staff

·         Drive test teams, FRT, Patrollers provided with masks, gloves and sanitizers

·         Daily stock taking of well-being of people

·         NW team connected 24x7 over phone/mails/whatsapps/VCs

·         Vehicles are tagged with “Emergency Telecom Services” stickers

·         Each field engineer carries 3 documents – DOT letter, Personal ID and Employee ID

An on ground example:

Ait is a small town approx. 137 Km from Kanpur (in Uttar Pradesh), served by a single BTS which developed an issue impacting the entire town. Our Engineer travelled 40Km on bike (in spite of the lock down and travel restrictions), and restored the faulty card ensuring connectivity to this town.