CEO's Blog

Important service numbers

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Tue, 29 May 2012 09:06:00 +0000

Namaste!

We have often been asked why Ncell customers don’t have access to important service numbers.

The scope of the important numbers can be a toll free number, a number which is not charged to where there is a charge based on service provided. Based on your feedback, we have identified the following numbers as important numbers:

Description Important numbers

1 Police Emergency 100

2 Fire Brigade 101

3 Ambulance 102

4 Valley Traffic Police 103

5 Police Headquarters 1113

6 NTC telephone enquiry 197

7 Child Helpline 1098

8 Hello Sarkar 1111

Today, Ncell customers can call to 2 toll free numbers – Police Emergency (100) and Ambulance (102).

However, we are facing challenges in getting the other important numbers and those challenges are due to the terms and policies related to those numbers , inadequate infrastructure that does not allow simple plug in to different Operators or something as simple as finding the owners for the individual numbers.

The ownership of Police Emergency is with Nepal Police and that of Ambulance is with Nepal Ambulance Service - meaning there is no centralized regulatory body governing all the important numbers and making connection mandatory to all the Operators in Nepal. This is one of the major policy loop holes when it comes to access to these numbers.

At present, only Nepal Telecom has access to all the above listed numbers but if another Operator wants to get an access to all the available numbers then we have to start from ground zero. This can be from setting up new equipments at owner’s premises or laying fibre cable or doing both to get an access. Most importantly, we have to comply with the existing set up for these numbers and most of these numbers lack proper expansion plan. The implementation can take 4 to 8 months.

This is where we see that NTA has a very important role to play. Firstly, in defining a standard number plan for all the possible important numbers along with it building an infrastructure that centralizes access to all the existing or any new important numbers in future. Secondly, to make integration to all these important numbers mandatory to all the Operators.

Definitely, we can’t wait for the above to happen soon so we have initiated discussion with the owners of the remaining numbers and few are in process to be initiated. We are now in the phase of understanding the setup and expansion plan for Women & Children trafficking (1098) and Fire Brigade (101) . We will then devise implementation plan and get these numbers rolling. The implementation of the remaining numbers will also happen but step wise.

Thanks Milee putting this information available to our valued customers!

Regards,

Pasi

New data scheme

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Wed, 16 May 2012 03:50:00 +0000

Namaste!

As promised at the last post, since last week we have had the poll for new data tariffs at Facebook. So far, about 1000 responds make your message clear: 46% of you like the 500 MB package, priced at 399 Rupees. Second favorite is the 40 MB (32% support) at 99 Rupees and third place went to daily pack with 3 MB and 6 Rupees. All the bigger packages have planned to have one month validity, with same price for Connect and normal SIM as is fair. Please log in to FB, go to Ncell fan site and give your votes plus valuable comments. Next week we go to NTA and ask for the permission to launch.

Today there were pretty good news for the telecom of Nepal. Firstly, we get more players to the market when so called universal license conditions was released. It means that so far regional operators can have national license too, by paying the 20 B lisence renewal fee. The other initiative is about infra sharing between operators: if we have built the tower somewhere, other operator can install their antennas etc. at the same tower with certain conditions and vice versa. This will help reduce the cost of investment and hopefully prices to you. Other thing is that we are not aware of the conditions and it might good to ask our opinion about what, when and how in order to make this a positive, concrete win-win for all the stakeholders. At the same time, the famous import license for radio parts is still pending, now for almost five months; e.g. our antennas is waiting in Lhasa for couple of weeks in trucks! Maybe we built our towers in Tibet;)

Internet Issues

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:37:00 +0000

Namaste! And Happy first of May to everyone!

During last couple of weeks we have been discussing internally a lot about internet issues. Thanks to your feedback too, we try find a new approach to the offering of mobile internet. The success and your demand for Ncell Connect and GPRS surfing has been positive but so far we do not seem to find a proper mechanism of pleasing most of the people what it comes to packages and pricing of mobile internet. Let me repeat couple of earlier said features when talking about radio based internet:

· The speed depends (signal strength) on type of building, windows, form of the building, trees or other buildings shadowing your location towards the base station

· Optimal speed is possible to get 100-200 meters from the nearest base station, then the weakening signal start reducing the speed: variation can be quite significant

· During load shedding, sometimes a base station can drop off. We do not have DG in every BS, and when next BS takes over, signal and speed goes down

· If the number of users connected to same BS is high, you all share the capacity of that BS and again, speed will be slower. Especially in the earlier case where number of all BS on air is reduced. We see peak in users between 9pm and 11pm, to get better speed please avoid these "after evening news" hours.

· All and all, the radio signal carrying the internet connection is a living organism which is quite challenging to optimize to all

· Capacity of radio waves is limited according to law of physic’s and therefore, we are unable to offer unlimited internet connection. If we would, couple of people downloading lot of data (like moviesJ) can “eat” the whole spectrum and the rest of you would be very very angry!

We do recognize the need for more base stations to improve the overall capacity in the network. We have plus 200 more to come, unfortunately the radio parts have been stored couple of months in Lhasa to be imported, waiting the import license from the Ministry of Communication. No laws have changed, we have been following existing legislations for past four years and this time the issue is only about linking microwave frequencies. Hope to get the license soon so you can get better quality and connectivity.

To serve you better, we are now doing home work on calculating existing and hopefully soon increasing capacity to find an ideal model of offering right packages with right prices. As the building of capacity in Nepal is more expensive than elsewhere (geography of Nepal, need for DG plus maintenance and fuel), unfortunately we cannot meet the lowest prices on earth like many of you is requesting. But finding some kind of …let’s say compromise between the capacity building and prices is our target. When looking at your comments, some have an approach that we try to “tease” you by having “unaffordable pricing”. Of course our goal is to find a deal that you can voluntarily buy our service and feel that you get good value for your money. And at the same time, get a decent payback to our investment of course. Thanks to your valuable feedback and your buying habits, we have naturally learned a lot on how to do this but final offering is something we’d like to create in collaboration with you. We will publish our new offering in social media probably next week and after having your comments, we will process the tariffs to be approved by NTA. Including same charge for data SIMs and normal SIMs as is logical. Hope we can build a successful internet case, Here for Nepal.

About 3G and more coverage

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 05:23:00 +0000

Namaste! Internet service is raising lot of comments, and no wonder: having a decent access to the internet is nowadays as bread and butter. Or daal baht when speaking in Nepal. We are constantly upgrading the network in more populated areas and to give you the fastest internet service in the country for as many as possible. Many of you have also expressed your concern about pricing, and there is not a simple answer on “When are you going to have affordable service” etc. We do a lot of work at TeliaSonera level to benchmark success cases and we also run businesses in many developing countries; the goal is to bring a good internet experience to as many as it is viable. To all in Nepal, it will take years or maybe never when talking about remote villages. The cost of one base station is from 30.000 US dollars onwards which means a lot of users to pay back the initial investment. We also need to build the fiber optical back bone in order to secure the capacity in the network in the long run Plus international connections by global network operators to run your connection to FB or YouTube. And you need to have 3G enabled devices, either data card of 3G handset. Looking at all this, the internet penetration will certainly take 2-3 years to go over 50% as the mobile voice already is.

We are also dependant on regulative issues: today’s situation is that 3G prices are a mystery because there is no price for 3G in government level. It is impossible for us to know the business case (and Your prices) for 3G until we know the price that we have to pay to the government of Nepal in the form of license and frequency fees. Furthermore, import licence of radio equipment has been pending at the ministry of communication for more than three months. Over 200 new base stations cannot be put on air due to unnecessary delay.

Anyway, we try to give you new reasons to select Ncell. Hope you enjoy the latest campaign for Ncell Connect: when you buy a package of 10 GB worth Rs. 2999(exclusive of taxes), you get the 3.6 MB data card worth Rs. 1999 (exclusive of taxes) for free. The campaign will start from today April 16, 2012. Enjoy surfing the fastest internet in Nepal! Many of you also ask about new coverage and for you and others, we have opened up a new service to look existing and planned coverage. When speaking about planned, you can expect the coverage to be in place within 3-12 months, bearing the before mentioned challenges in mind. Please find the link below.

"Naya Barsako Subha kamana!"

http://www.ncell.com.np/connect/connect-coverage

Number Game

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 09:45:00 +0000

Painting eggs for the Easter is old tradition in my country: purple is my favourite

The title is picked up from some Facebook comment, where one of our “fans” is pointing at the growing number of Ncell customers and obviously trying to say that we are playing with the numbers. The logic in this game is easy even though it might look confusing; it looks sometimes confusing to me too.

Mobile industry is international with international standards and in the data base, there are two kinds of registers: the home location register (HLR) is a central database that contains details of each mobile phone subscriber that is authorized to use the Ncell core network. Meaning that this customer can call or send message if there is balance at his/her account. This is the figure that we release. The visitor location register (VLR) is a database of the customers who have roamed in the network. Meaning, that their SIM card had been connected to some of Ncell base stations, somewhere in Nepal.

According international standards, NTA and mobile operators in Nepal release the number of HLR customers in public for several reasons: firstly as said, that’s how the piano plays. HLR is also reliable comparing apple to apple because VLR can vary for several reasons. And naturally, it looks betterJ. When talking about mobile penetration, also NTA is releasing HLR figures, which is not the entire truth; but it is the best available, comparable figure. To be able to know the exact penetration, one needs to know the amount of customers having several subscriptions and it becomes too difficult.

VLR data depends on many issues. In Nepal like in any prepaid market, people tend to carry several SIM cards. And when using those, they do not always use the same SIM: they use one to all public, one to family members etc. Yearly, some 250.000 people leave for emigrant assignments abroad and they do not show up in the network even though they are at HLR. Sometimes they come back during the validity time. Many people in the countryside use their connection very seldom and often during certain times to receive calls from their relatives abroad. And so forth.

At Ncell, we clean the HLR in continuous basis. We pay software licenses based on number of users and it does not make any sense to show too big figures. According international standards, we call a customer active if he/she has made a chargeable action during the past rolling month. Somebody has also claimed that we show the number of sold SIMs which is not thru, that number might be 15-16 million.

The amount of active customers is around 80% of the HLR number, but it is sometimes much higher. For instance, when there was the earthquake in India last autumn, the number increased a lot as people had urgent need to be in touch with their loved ones. Internationally, this is a good and healthy figure showing that people rely on our network. Thank you for that!

Happy Easter!

Regards,

Pasi

More about Regulation and VOIP

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:20:00 +0000

Looking forward to Jacarandas to bloom soon!

Namaste!

Last post was about the wish list to regulator, this time let’s be more specific:

Apply a sensible tax and tariff regime to network operators in order to allow meaningful returns and stimulate investment in infrastructure, long term. Please, do not break the industry boundaries and force mobile operators to terminate low quality, cheap ILD VOIP calls to our networks.

Quite a many people have given feedback on VOIP issue. Yes, you are right that VOIP can be a challenge to operators….but: only if governments do false decisions allowing business models and industries to be mixed by regulation. Some background at my earlier post and article at Republica in July 2011: http://blog.ncell.com.np/2011/07/voip.html

VOIP is excellent technology, used effectively by large mass of consumers and business e.g. in Skype (We are using it too:). VOIP in computer to computer is very cheap compared to mobile calls for instance. Totally ok! But forcing mobile operators to terminate cheap and low quality VOIP calls to billion dollar mobile networks is totally wrong!

In Nepal, NTA is for some reason very eager to introduce regulated price for terminating VOIP calls to mobile networks and thus, aiming to harm the newly build mobile business and decrease the tax revenues to government of Nepal. Why would government office of Nepal want to influence negatively in development of the country?

Let’s have some easy mathematics. Estimated revenue that NTC and Ncell get from foreign operators for terminating the traffic is about 20 B NPR in a yearly basis. Now, NTA is proposing to slash the termination rate in Nepal, between operators and Internet Service Providers to 72 paisa per minute. This would mean that the revenues would be only 10% of 20B, means 2B. That revenue will be shared between operators and ISPs. Loss for the government of Nepal as lost taxes would be on the level of 5.5 B NPR (VAT, revenue based license fees, rural development fund, frequency fees etc). Happens to be close to the revenue gap of 4 B NPR, that is missing from the government coffer right nowJ. Loss for the mobile operators would be 18B NPR. Why would anyone want to do this? And, during a year when Nepal government want's to have more foreign investors to build the infrastructure of the country. Ncell has invested a handsome 300 M USD in telecom infra and now the lollipop is in danger to be given to freeriders.

NTA’s argument has been twofold:

1. By the regulation, the illegal call by bass will be in control.

· Good argument, but it is three years late; at Ncell network the illegal call by bass is next to zero! Same level at NTC, thanks to us and Nepal Police who have earned a lot of tax money to Nepal. Nepal thanks you Nepal Police!

2. Calling from Nepal is cheaper than calling to Nepal. To Nepal, prices should be lower.

· True. But normal practice in every business, based on purchasing power of each and every country. Domestic regulation in Nepal has no influence on tariffs decided in Qatar, Malaysia or US if the operators in those countries do not want to. And why should they?

· With the income that we get from abroad, we have afforded to reduce our tariffs to many destinations from Nepal. Enjoy! Why should we be punished for the good job done for Nepali people?

Anyway, only beneficaries in Nepal would be the ISPs, so what's the clue?

Someone has nominated the 40 M USD Asia Development Fund to be the driver. Why should ADB deliver money to technology restricted project in rural areas when NTC and Ncell could build effectively a modern, high speed 3G network for both speech and data. With 40 M USD one can build roughly 250 green field mobile base stations plus transmission. The backbone can be build easily with the money in the Rural Development Fund, existing money at NTA’s account…paid by YOU, dear Customer.

Look forward to your kind comments.

Regards,

Pasi

Mobile World Conference-with Recommendations for Telecom Authorities

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:06:00 +0000

The world biggest mobile congress was held last week in Barcelona, Spain. The story of www.mobileworldcongress.com begun over 15 years at Cannes; the GSMA (Association of mobile industry, GSM by then) wanted to have one place where all the vendors, operators and partners can meet and share best practices of the hot and booming phenomena. It all begun small with couple of thousand people, to become a show of 60.000 attendees. All and all, it is very important market place for new mobile phone launch, cutting edge technologies and sharing of knowledge among the industry. At Ncell, we took the opportunity to learn from the world’s best, this year we had nine people attending.

Typically, technology evolution takes a long time to take off. They say that technology implications are overestimated in short term and underestimated in long term. One of the most interesting areas in this field was the Mobile Financial Services development: GSMA and handset manufactures have been working with the technical specifications for ten years already, and now it seems that little by little the consumer concepts will be introduced big time. The technology in short: the mobile wallet application is placed in SIM card and when making a payment at kiosk for instance, customer set’s the phone close to the cash register and done. Application at the SIM card and cash register discuss over so called Near Field Communication. Money is taken from customer’s virtual wallet and transmitted to kiosk’s account. In US and Europe, many mobile operators have newly established joint ventures to handle this new business, TeliaSonera among one of them. In Japan and Korea, the ecosystem is more favorable and thus, speed of development is also faster.

Other topic which I liked a lot was the mobile development in developing countries. We heard Spanish Telefonica (they are huge player in South America) introducing their operations: “What is emerging market actually?” “The emerging market is something that you cannot merge in emergency”! Well said and very much thru in case of Nepal too. It seems that all the companies who operate in emerging markets, face the same dilemma of “overactive” government authorities. As the telecommunication is so lucrative from tax point of view, it is easy to ask the growing industry to pay other areas of development, and too often, by the cost of infrastructure investment in the country. Let me share the emerging market wish list to the telecommunication authorities. NTA please: (some Nepal related issues)

· Avoid hyper competitive conditions which discourage investment , like they did in India)

o (NTA has managed this actually very well)

· Ensure efficient spectrum allocation at pricing which incentivizes network deployment

o (We need to know the price of 3G spectrum ASAP, customer are hungry for mobile internet but development is now frozen)

o (In 2014, 20 B NPR is to be paid as the price of license renewal already. Auctioned, by the way)

· Allow for productivity gains through infrastructure rationalization and sharing schemes

o (Very good initiative for building the fiber backbone by Rural Development Fund)

· Stimulate and encourage use of mobile broadband networks through services fostered by government

o (e.g. Some m-health, m-learning services for remote villagers)

o (renegotiate the ADB fund for building technology agnostic access instead)

· Apply a sensible tax regime to network operators in order to allow meaningful returns and stimulate investment in infrastructure, long term

o (Please, do not break the industry boundaries and force mobile operators to terminate low quality, cheap ILD VOIP calls to our networks)

Happy Holi everybody, spread a lot of purple around!

Challenges

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 13:35:00 +0000

Dear Customer of Ncell,

I hope you have enjoyed the warming temperatures and the new green grass, the sun and life in general. We at Ncell look forward to blooming of jacarandas, more surya of Nepal, warm spring days, Shiva’s birthday and the opportunity to serve you better.

Unfortunately, during last couple of weeks we have had lot of challenges: I am very sorry for the inconvenience caused by the defected scratch cards, delivered by our vendor from India. Many of you had to call us to get your account topped up; sure you do not like it, we do not like it but sometimes these things just happen. A BIG apology! The nasty consequence of this whole issue is that we cannot take care of your normal service needs as our call center is overloaded due to printing error of scratch cards! And at the same time, our people are under tremendous pressure with calls waiting, and too many of you have to wait too long to get through to the service agent.

Actions taken:

· 2.5M card’s quality checked in warehouse and quarantined

·       0.6M defective cards called back from market

·       The deal with the vendor is terminated and a new order has been placed with different company

·       40 agents were added in contact centre to handle the extra volume of calls

·       50% of back office team are retrieving PIN and recharging manually compromising the daily work

As you can see, we have had a crisis management in house. A BIG HAND to our customer relations people who have been working under such pressure and still, have been able to take care of other issues as well! It seems that next week the amount of effected cards in the market will be less and we (You and us) can get back to normal operations. Thank you for your patience dear customer!

The other challenge these days is the load shedding. Even though we have batteries, generators and hundreds of people taking care of our network maintenance, sometimes a site goes down. Typical reason is that long power cuts do not charge batteries properly and/or there is a fault in DG. When a particular site with antennas stop working, the neighboring site(s) takes over and handles the traffic. Sometimes there is so much traffic already that the ongoing call will drop and you have to call again or, the new site taking the traffic is so far that the signal weakens and the voice quality drops. Normally, we get these issues fixed in two-three hours but sometimes the fault can be back haul transmission. For transmission, we use microwave and fiber. Fiber is better of course and the capacity is super, but two weeks back we noticed that rats like it too: in two of our transmission hubs, these little creatures had eaten the surface of the cord and cut the fiber.

Although rats are more close to Lord Ganesh, wish you all a very good Shiva Ratri!

Yours,
Pasi

Here for Nepal

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 14:29:00 +0000

Namaste!

Every now and then, I get involved in discussion on what does it actually mean to be “Here for Nepal” as our slogan states?

At the article, published by Kathmandu Post on Wednesday, you can read most of it in numbers:

http://www.ekantipur.com/2012/01/26/business/ncell-posts-122-percent-growth-in-revenue/347870.html

We also have had quite a bit of feedback in social media about other proposals for “Here for Nepal”. Some say "do that" or "do this" and then, you are really “Here for Nepal”: "share Golden SIM money to everyone, support transplants, build a tower in particular village, open up NTC controlled emergency numbers to Ncell customers, decrease prices to half etc". Some have even said that Ncell has seen as one of the NGOs bringing infrastructure to Nepal. Yes, we have build coverage to 90% of the Nepalese people, but in business terms.

Please have authentic customer feedback from last week, word to word:

“Thank you for the unimaginable advancement that Ncell has brought in this country, where telecom was considered privilege, accessible & affordable only to a certain class of the society, not many years ago. I congratulate and thank you, for this tremendous comfort you distributed in the society in totality. With success, comes people’s expectation and with this clings huge responsibility and accountability towards the consumers.” There we are, “Here for Nepal”.

If you look at the numbers in the Ekantipur news in the link above, it is telling part of the contribution in monetary terms. Our Finance people made a calculation on overall cash contributed to the Government of Nepal; the sum from last fiscal year ended up to 10 Billion Rupees! The 10B consist of all the taxes, government funds, license fees, frequency fees and import duties of equipments for Ncell. Yes, that is 10B of 17B revenues. Every increase in telecom density increases Gross National Product and economic activity of the nation; last year 2.7 Million new customers were able to get good connectivity through Ncell. Not bad. At the business sector, we have offered successfully new goodies for customers to get connected through the best network (here) in Nepal, BlackBerry and Pro plans. Ncell is also “Here for Business Customers in Nepal”. We launched the fastest internet in Nepal about one and half years ago and became the biggest ISP supported by the good customer experience. “For Nepal”,sure.

We employ directly 540 persons and indirectly, in service provision, about the same number of people. On top of that, about 40.000 families earn commissions at our distribution channel. In Corporate Social Responsibility, we have a strategy to get basic education available to more and more school age children: we adopt schools and donate our Connect-products to schools in order for them to have e-libraries in hand.

But as the customer feedback at above lines tells us: “With success, comes people’s expectation and with this clings huge responsibility and accountability towards the consumers.” Our trekking at the “Here for Nepal”-path has begun just three years ago. We know that we need to work harder to win more and more hearts and furthermore, give world class customer service to our customers.

Actually it is You, our valued customer, You enable us to be here “for You Nepalese”; 7 Million of YouJ. We are not yet there to say “Mission Accomplished” and stand still, instead, Himalaya trekking continues.

“Here for Nepal” -and proud of it!

Quality Surveys

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 12:02:00 +0000

Namaste!

There was interesting news last Thursday when NTA published their annual quality survey. It was nicely quoted in main news papers, hope many of you had change to read the articles. As expected, Ncell was getting best scores but still, we have room to improve. There was also lively and good discussion at the press conference of NTA about the different approaches to the quality issue. NTA had actually made two surveys, one or the network quality and the other one for the perceived quality by subscribers. We did challenge both of them as we do our quarterly measurements with best available tools and sample, and the one by NTA was conducted with very little sample with normal handsets and furthermore, it is made in August-September last year. We have been improving our quality month by month and we do actually meet NTA’s benchmark criteria already. In spite of continuous drive tests, the best test for local household level network quality is your assessment. To get your feedback easier to our processes, we have new email address for your perusal: emailus@ncell.com.np. Naturally, when we face the load shedding of 11 hours a day, 95% of quality failures are caused by power and right address for most of the feedback should be Nepal Electric AuthorityJ

As You as our customer are our most powerful authority and we constantly work to improve our quality for you, I’d also like to share with you the response that we gave to NTA. Please:

Subject: Response to the letter ref. no. 1928 regarding QOS survey report

Regarding the annual survey for the customer perception about the NTA is really welcomed by Ncell, we are highly committed for the top customer experience.

At the same time we do not agree with the outcomes which has been concluded after the survey. We are very much open to NTA about the quality reports and we are sending them to NTA every quarter. Ncell is doing the survey among the entire network of 7 million customers, by using the highly sophisticated tools. In most of the cases, we have been above the benchmark level, which is completely contradictory with the NTA survey report. We have the saved log files and we welcome NTA expert for validation.

Hence we would like to request to have a look on following comments:

Ncell has disagreement on the process of making the NTA quality assessment.

Definition of range (it doesn’t show the differentiation of network quality with operators).
Does it meet the standard of measuring quality or quality assessment? For us, the method does not full fill good quality standards.
How about the quality of data and data validation? It should be transparent and available to all parties for validation.

NTA should differentiate between Network performance and customer experience measurement for Network Quality. Having customer survey is not a valid quality measurement but rather an opinion survey. We have achieved all the Network Performance KPIs set by the NTA except POI congestion.
Ncell agrees with some survey data but not with all of it. (e.g it seems other operators’’ Call Set Up Success Rate is very much different when compared with our quarterly benchmarking result)
Ncell has defined the quality management process :

Daily Network Performance Monitoring using PMS (Results are above the quality target except POI KPIs)
Daily calls testing using SIGOSS system. (Results are fine).
Quarterly Benchmarking which is real customer experience measurement in 8 cities and 3 main highways
Six Sigma KPIs being improved a lot and continuous improvement projects are being implemented. In November 2011, we reached one of the best network KPIs at TeliaSonera Group benchmarking with 20 different operators. So called DPMO (Defects Per Million Calls was at level of 7000 which is a standard in Nordic countries like Sweden and Finland.

We are open to share the quality status we are getting from the system and the process that we are following to maintain and improve quality in the network.

Summary about billing performance:

1. Subscriber growth of Ncell proves that customers are satisfied with our service.

Questionnaires itself is not sufficient to collect proper information which would indicate the valid billing performance. It should be separate questionnaires for pre paid and post paid subscriber. Most of your questions suits only for post paid customers.
As per the survey report, there is the performance level below the 50% whereas it is 85% in Biratnagar. So it is contradictory itself because we have a common billing system for entire Nepal.
Approx we get 1M subscribers queries a month, out of which only 0.00006% is related with the billing.

Sincerely,

Pasi Koistinen
President and CEO

Ncell

Roaming

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 15:31:00 +0000

Happy New Year to You all! Wish the 2012 will be healthy, prosperous and favourable to everyone in every possible aspect. Suba Kamana!

Lot of requests and questions have been raised regarding roaming, please find my blog this time about the international issues. Roaming is very versatile and sometimes complicated issue, hope you find the following usefull. Tried to write it as general language as possible.

Traditionally, Roaming is defined (cf. GSM Association Permanent Reference Document AA.39) as the ability for a cellular customer to automatically make and receive voice calls, send and receive data, or access other services, including home data services, when travelling outside the geographical coverage area of the home network, by means of using a visited network.

So, if you travel to India and use Ncell SIM there by accessing e.g. Airtel, you are roaming. At Ncell we have postpaid roaming but also prepaid roaming (also known as Camel roaming). If you are prepaid customer the number of destinations is limited to 7 countries and only limited to voice roaming. The reason for the limited offering is the fact that in prepaid, both network should have real time charging and it is not that easy to arrange when billing systems are different. If you want to have good roaming facility and in more parts of the world, have the Pro schemes (post paid/paid in advance) with Ncell: we have roaming agreement with 249 operators in 87 countries for voice roaming, and 187 operators and 67 countries for data (GPRS) roaming.

Before you travel, have enough credit at your account, minimum of 10,000 NRS per week of roaming, according to our system. If do not want to use roaming, switch off the roaming in the settings of your phone. The rules between operators have been agreed so that as the caller is not able to know the location of the receiver, the receiving party pays the international part of the call. Means: you pay. According to the tariffs of the local network; the settlement is done between Ncell and foreign operator on monthly basis. You pay us and we pay the foreign operator. The caller in home country pays normal domestic tariff. Example: you as Ncell mobile customer call to your cousin in New York having Ncell SIM roaming at AT&T mobile network. You pay our normal rate 1.99 plus tax, your cousin pays as per the roaming tariff.

If you want to use data and/or mobile internet (also called as GPRS in telecom jargon) for your emails when abroad, we recommend using public Wi-Fi networks or Wi-Fi at hotels which has a fixed fee. No roaming charges. Settings at your phone to Wi-Fi on, and data roaming off. If you want to read your emails through your mobile phone, put the data roaming on instead but be prepared to pay for charges according local operator. By the way, the beauty of the BlackBerry phone is data compression: it uses only 10% of the data compared to other phones so reading emails while roaming is handy and cost effective. But please do not start surfing in the Internet that will cost you a lot! Actually, surfing at the Internet while roaming is the single biggest reason for huge bills; people often do not realize the fact so if you have Ncell Connect with roaming facility, do not put the data card in the laptop to avoid any bills. If you need to, use with care!

We have dedicated team of Account Managers for business customers and if (hopefully) you are our Pro customer, our people are there to help and answer to your questions. Or please call Corporate Customer Care at 9007. My advice is: please, study roaming before travelling! Checklist:

· Find the roaming operators in your visit country at http://www.ncell.com.np/pro/roaming/international

· Decide if you want to use roaming or not

· Study how to change settings at your phone, do the settings before you leave Nepal

· Have enough credit at your account

· When arriving your destination country, be sure that you have desired settings at your phone

o If you are not sure, keep it shut down or be prepared to pay the billJ

· Sometimes you have to use Manual Search of the network to find the roaming operator

Enjoy your trip!
Regards,
Pasi

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 08:49:00 +0000

The Santa Claus, or Father Christmas from Finland would like to wish You, and everybody in Nepal a peaceful Christmas time and a Happy New Year!

According to Christmas tradition of Finland, you are supposed to be kind to your self, your friends, family members and actually, ALL the people! Thank you for following Ncell CEO blog and giving your valuable feed back to help Ncell to develop better services and top Customer Experience.

The blog continues again 1st of January with Roaming issues.

Regards,

Santa Claus and Pasi

Overcharging is getting Over

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 09:23:00 +0000

It was s a great Saturday weather, got invited to a yard party: it is nice to see that there is purple flowers also this time of the year. Hope we have "short" winter before Jacarandas will start blooming again!

During last couple of weeks we have been working to solve the overcharging issue. The situation is getting better all the time: we sat down with the channel, press and ourselves to find reasonable solutions to stop such a bad experience. As a result, we changed the dealership and comission structure plus focused on authorized dealers and POS to help you to have fixed prices. Now we have some 4000 aouthorized dealers who understand the issue from customer point of view. On top of that, there are some 40.000 kiosks and some of them might ask some extra rupiees but again, it is up to you if you want to pay some extra for convenience. I do understand that Nepal is difficult country in geographical terms and if you want to recharge at Annapurna trek for instance, it is pretty ok to give a 5-10 Rupie tip. But those 4000 aouthorized POS should now solve the problem in recidential areas. By the way, we terminated some 200 of them who did not want to follow our advice on good customer experience. Thank you all for your support and beeing our mystery shoppers. Please find an article for the same at Republica.

http://www.myrepublica.com/portal/index.php?action=news_details&news_id=39334

It would be nice to hear your feed back if things are now getting ok.

Be ready for the New Year Offer!

Regards,
Pasi

Comparisons

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 08:31:00 +0000

Namaste!

At Ncell, the upgrade of the network continues as was the case during the whole year. Now we go to full Internet Protocol, MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching), to have enough capacity for increasing traffic. Everything went well until Thursday; unfortunately, many of you experienced the hick up: one IP router got overloaded, due to some weird process in it. This caused a signaling problem between some switches and business support system. Domestic calls and sms were down for about two hours but data and international traffic was working normally. About 2 Million people mainly in Bagmati were affected. These kinds of things are pretty “normal” in the IP world; our competitor’s network was out for 18 hours in Norway last summer. BUT, these sorts of things should not happen! My sincere apologies for any inconvenience caused to our valued customers.

The big issue in overcharging is getting better. To make the prices and taxes transparent to you, we initially changed the charging mechanism in recharge cards in October 2011. Before, when you bought 100 Rupee card, you paid the ownership tax on top of it. The two rupee we transfered to tax authorities on behalf of you as ownership tax. It made 102. This additional Rs 2 gave way to the POS to charge to nearest round figure of Rs 5 (made 105), which was not correct and transparent. Nowadays we have reduced MRP with taxes to Rs 100 and you get a balance of 98.04 compared to Rs 100 earlier on your account. (100 minus 98.04 is the tax part which we pay to government). When we introduced the new scheme and MRP, some 60 % of the kiosks begun overcharging 5 rupees as a routine. The official commission for the channel has remained same all the time. We have had meetings with our distributors who control the dealers, and dealers further should control POS: they are committed to rectify this bad customer experience, and also the commission structure within the channel was changed so that POS get bigger stake of the total commission. At the same time, we have terminated 114 agreements with our authorized POS. Just to remind again: DO NOT PAY ANY EXTRA. 50 Rupee scratch card shall cost 50, 100 is 100 and so fort.

There has been quite a lot of feed back in many issues. Thank you for your comments. Based on also your feedback, you can now have the night rate to Sajilo tariff. Many of you compare prices with NTC. I have said in my earlier blog that we are two different kinds of operators: we at Ncell want to be very much quality oriented, whereas NTC seems to believe that price is the main value creator for customers. Good so. It is important to have alternatives for consumers to choose. At Ncell we try to bring you the best quality of Customer Experience, sometimes with higher prices; offering best quality with lowest prices would put us in insolvency in longer run. If you look at base tariffs only, our on net is NPR 1.99 per minute and NTC is offering 1.50 for the same. We upgraded our billing system in April and can offer variety of prices schemes instead: e.g. with Friends and Family service you can talk by .99 a minute. Lowest offers have been at the level of 0.50. What it comes to mobile internet, our data price is definitely higher than NTC’s but the real surfing speed is more than double. And so on. And not to forget cross subsidizing of NTC fixed-Mobile: you pay 53 paisa for NTC, every minute you call to their fixed line number. Unfortunately, we have to collect it from you and credit further to NTC. Unfair competition and extra charge for you all. But you are right, and as the network failure and some other stumbling has showed, we are not perfect. We keep on improving quality, customer experience and affordability of our services to you all.

You customers actually do the testimony and proof in practise that our concept and offering is best in the country: from the articles below (official figures from NTA) you can see that August-October we have got 70% of all new subscribers in Nepal. We have gained some 14 market share percent units increase in two years to make us neck to neck in ALL telephone services (GSM, CDMA, PSTN) with NTC. At GSM, we gained market leadership already in March 2011. Among the internet users, Ncell has 59 per cent of the market followed by Nepal telecom with 38 per cent, with GPRS, ADSL, Dial-Up and CDMA services counted all together. According to reports, cable operators (Subisu, WorldLink etc.) have 3% of the internet market.

Thank You, you valued Ncell customer!

http://www.ekantipur.com/2011/11/26/business/number-of-mobile-phone-users-ever-surging/344462.html

http://thehimalayantimes.com/fullNews.php?headline=Mobile+users+growing+by+10+people+per+day&NewsID=311137

Network problem

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 15:14:00 +0000

We had a signaling problem due to malfunction in IP network.

Effects:

1. Network was fluctuating in some parts of the country
2. Everything is working normally now
3. Data was not affected

The problem existed at about 5:30 pm, until 8:10 pm today.

I'm really sorry for the inconvenience caused to our valued customers.

Regards,

Pasi

Thank You NTC!

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 10:12:00 +0000

Motivated by your valuable feedback, I made some mystery shopping over the weekend. It was very interesting: three points of sales out of ten do not overcharge, and I had interesting discussion with those who do. “Why do you ask 105 for 100”? I do get only a rupee for selling this. “What do you do for that rupee; you just give the card and get my money?” Yes, but I do have to pay the rent of the kiosk. “But I can buy some other items as I have a good reason to come to you stall.?” Silence. “So 100 rupee is enough? OK. So the lesson of this exercise was that you do not have to pay extra, but I understand that everyone does not have the perseverance to talk the transaction towards the happy end. Good thing is that there is also 30% of POS who understand the good customer experience and as I told you at my earlier blog, do concentrate buying from these “Good Guys”. Bad behavior and overcharging will vanish automatically. Other approach we have also taken is the measures through dealers. POS is in their hands and dealers are responsible for this window towards customers. They have promised to take necessary actions and I am confident that it will work out. If not, then we have to draw the conclusion that we have something wrong in the channel structure.

Couple of comments on the feedback of “We are setting the international standard in Nepal”

http://www.myrepublica.com/portal/index.php?action=news_details&news_id=37939

As the journalist so correctly stated, Ncell is all the time improving its operation benchmarked on international level of quality. As many of you commented, we are not yet ready, and we are bringing better customer experience and quality of services in all levels, all the time. What we already have brought in is e.g 24/7 Customer Care, Ncell Centers, Ncell Brand, and last but not least the network quality. Regarding network quality, we already offer almost world class service; we measure this by so called six sigma-standard and according to latest figures, we are good. But we will keep on improving.

Good news at the end. We thank NTC for allowing our customers, YOU, enough capacity during peak hours to call their network!! This was one of the easiest matters to rectify on the way towards World Class Telecom Country. For the past two weeks you might have noticed that connection to NTC network has been on excellent level. Thank you NTC on behalf of all of our customers!!

Overcharging

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 14:17:00 +0000

Namaste!

Hope everybody has had great holidays. I was shortly in my home country Finland and got a nasty influenza; feel still that half of my head context is following me in the air between Doha and Kathmandu. No can do, back to work..

There has been a lot of feedback and complaint about the point of sales charging too much for recharge cards. No wonder. Initially, we wanted to make everything easy for our customer by introducing MRPs and paying the withholding tax for you. The tax is actually the reason that your balance after recharging is not showing the face value of the card itself; we pay every single rupee to government coffer. The overcharging itself is not from this world, and we do not neither support nor accept it. It seems that there is some kind of country wide cartel in kiosks: I wanted to recharge my DishHome account and went to local POS in Lalitpur. And, the nice lady asked 10 NPR more than nominal value. When I asked “what is this 10 rupees for?”, she said “for me”. Kind of cute, isn’t it?

We have more than 40.000 point of sales countrywide. Controlling them by Ncell would be mission impossible and sure, you would not like to pay the cost of the operation in your minute price. The reason for our open letter to public was that please help us to fight this unfair phenomena. Only NOT PAYING EXTRA helps! Small entrepreneurs running kiosk see this opportunity short sighted and will shoot their own leg in the long run. Mobile telephony is a commodity nowadays and person appearing at their window or door, easily buys also some lollipops to make the average check bigger. When you stop going there and instead, buy from authorized dealers, Ncell Centres and honest kiosks, the grey economy will automatically disappear. What we can do is to increase various ways of electronic charging, and again, POS will lose their commission. So Dear Mr./Mrs. POS Entrepreneur, better stop overcharging and have your business running prosperously.

I would like to talk about different kind of overcharging. You give a lot of feedback that we should lower our tariffs. There was an article in Republica where I raise one crucial issue that would help you to get better rates and again, have a fair competion in Nepal:

http://www.myrepublica.com/portal/index.php?action=news_details&news_id=37939

The message in short: you should not be charged interconnection fees between Ncell and NTC fixed line. You pay 53 paisa per minute extra charge to NTC for visiting their network. Unfortunately, the system works so that we collect the money from you and then pay to NTC for the same. And you think it is our high tariff, not at all.

The charge does not exist between NTC mobile and NTC fixed line, which makes the rules of the game unfair for you and us.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_subsidization

Happy Laxmi Puja and (de)lightful Depawali!

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 14:17:00 +0000

Northern Lights from Finland, October 2011

Customer Feedback

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 08:45:00 +0000

Customer feedback is so important to us in order to improve your experience with Ncell. Special thanks to Shekhar; we changed our procedure accordingly and we got also you BlackBerry working:) The incompatibility problem was caused by the handset manufacture's (RIM in Canada) global error in the system. Now it is fixed. To have a positive end of the Dashain celebrations, one genuine and so heart warming letter from one of our customers, please:

My experience with Ncell

It was my first time in Asia when I came to work in Nepal in January 2007. After settling in my new home, getting my bearings in the city, being introduced to Kathmandu traffic, and tasting delicious momos, in the same week of my arrival I decided to get myself a sim card to be able to use my mobile phone locally. So, I approached to one of the small shops in Jawalakel with the request of buying a sim-card. I got offered two options – NTC and Mero Mobile. Since I was new in the country, I didn’t have a clue which one was better. And of course, as a customer, I wanted to get the best deal.

When I asked for more explanation about the difference of these two companies, I got to know that NTC is run by the government, whereas Mero Mobile was a private company. I also got to know that I had to wait at least a month in order to get a phone number from NTC, whereas Mero Mobile sim card was available to buy and use immediately. I had to pay my monthly bills at NTC office, whereas I could increase my balance by buying a top-up card and activate it immediately. So I had enough information to make my decision.

The next day I got a phone call by a person who spoke with me in my language (Azeri & Russian). He introduced himself as a distributor for Mero Mobile and offered me any other help that I may require from Mero Mobile. I felt so touched by this gesture of goodwill. I know that it was not just a coincident that I was treated as a special customer, but it was because of Mero Mobile’s care for its customers. There was a time that I had small problems with my account (e.g. I didn’t know how to top up my balance) during first few months of using Mero Mobile. He was always there within three rings to provide guidance on the phone or to come and sort out the problem personally. He kept saying that his duty is not just selling sim cards, but making sure that customers are satisfied and happy with the service. Being new in a strange country I was in need for a support and direction while I was adjusting to a new way of doing things. And these needs were already partly met by my friends and by the organisation I worked for. However, I have always been a believer in a good local infrastructure that supports local people and gives them right direction. And Mero Mobile as a telecommunication company was there to fulfil my needs as a customer.

When I look back and remember those times, I feel that there have been a lot of changes in the market in terms of products and services. While it was already functioning in its best, Ncell has increased its service capacity dramatically. For example, I can easily reach most countries without any problem; I can top-up my balance much more easily as the top-up cards are sold pretty much everywhere in Kathmandu. Most importantly, I feel valued when I am regularly informed about the details of how my money is used and about promotional offers. I believe that I made the best decision by choosing Ncell and I am proud of being Ncell customer.

Jeyran Shirinova

Human Resources Consultant
Kathmandu, Nepal

Happy Dashain!

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 08:16:00 +0000

After couple of months of exercising the use of social media in a personal level but in business, directly with Ncell customers, I am so pleased to feel energized because of your feedback. I do follow Facebook as well and I am very proud of our professional customer care people answering your questions. Please try to help them to help you better: please provide exact description of your problem and your contact number, it helps our other teams to be in touch with you quicker and more effectively. Other thing, please try not to bring specific network coverage or other issues related on your personal subscription to this blog. Due to time constraints, I am not able to follow your cases as personally as our call center or Facebook team. We want to give you a world class customer service and we have several teams helping you, call center and other direct customer officers are coordinating your request according to our processes. Let them to take care of you, they are pros.

What it comes to quality service, we have selected top customer experience as our main target to convince you to become, and stay as our subscribers. This is also the reason (sorryJ) that we have to charge more about our services than our competitors: we invest more, we optimize our network better, we do drive test continuously to ensure best connectivity, we try harder and it also costs more. At this light, please try not to compare our prices with competition…I’d also like to stay at Hyatt or Soaltee for USD 50 or less cause they offer the best hotel quality in Nepal. Our data speed is in the average five times more than competitor’s so we are Hyatt or Crown Plaza in the sense. Our competitors may see the low price as the main value driver for their customers, but we want to offer you the best quality service. Yes, you are right that prices are too high for a “common” Nepalese (as you describe) or maybe students with restricted income. But we really try to do our best in enabling more and more people to buy the fastest internet in Nepal. Hope you like our 50% decreased offer for 5000 MB data package; if we learn that this is one way of keeping you as our customers and get more of you joining us, we might consider further offers.

Network coverage is also essential part of the quality service. I just recently moved to new house and found out that 3G coverage is pretty awkward: only place where I could get my Ncell Connect card or iPad connected to high speed internet is at the balcony of the house. The reason being, the neighboring house is shadowing the signal and I had to make a “hot spot” at the terrace… It is not very convenient to sit outside, dark in the evening with all the insects reading Ncell business secrets at my screen. Noticed, that the guy next door is sitting in their family room for the same reason. When you are buying your Ncell Connect card, please make sure that there is coverage in your area. You can get better price for cable internet compared to EDGE. Putting a 3G network node to the tower costs several tens of thousands of USD and unfortunately, we can’t afford building coverage in every village very soon even I’d like to. But like in Kathmandu, we want to give you a good service. If you face problems like mine, please be in touch to our customer care and we try to fix it if doable with fair costs. And more you like us in big cities, the quicker we are providing 3G in rural areas too.

Hope you the best of health, prosperity and the most of fortune plus quality service from Ncell! Happy Dashain to everyone!

About rates, cost and coverage

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 16:46:00 +0000

Dear Friends, thank you for your numerous opinions concerning our services. One thing which is naturally very interesting is the rates; sure we listen to our customer feedback. We come up with new offers when the time is right and there is something exciting to offer. Hopefully you have noticed the latest offer called Ncell Pro which is pretty nice: by buying one the latest 3G handsets you get it fully loaded with Ncell SIM card, talk time and sms plus data package. Hope you like this! Some people are also saying that we favor always new customers but indeed, there are many nice goodies in the portfolio for old subscribers as well: once you have been with us for six months, you start getting bonus which mean lower rates for you automatically. This is fare both ways because registration of new SIM cards is a cost for us, SIM card is a cost money and so on. We really hope that we have more and more active and long term customers to serve...and give free minutes every now and then as you wish. On the other hand, we have invested beautiful amounts in the best network of Nepal to fulfill your demand of coverage and capacity and we need more of you to pay the investments in the long run. Thank you for being our customers. :)

Ncell Connect has been quite a success. Within a year after the introduction of the fastest internet in Nepal, we have become also the biggest Internet Service Provider in the country of Himalayas. Some of you also claim that we are Kathmandu centric when talking about the Connect. That is also somewhat thru. When we begun 3G investments, we did not know about the real demand for such a service. Therefore, we decided to concentrate in KTM first and build a good coverage and offer enough capacity at the capital. Once you have shown your growing interest towards Connect, we also started building more sites in other areas and cover some 18 cities already. The investments require pretty much money and time plus at the same time, we have to make sure that traditional 2G voice services also get their share. Anyway, we are happy that more and more of you buy our data packages; we can continue investments and offer more coverage in the future.

We had recently our TeliaSonera Eurasia networking event and I felt so proud in introducing our new set up for better service at Facebook for my 130 colleagues from other ventures around Asia and Europe. It feels so good to see our dedicated personnel to answer your request and problems in a professional manner. Thanks Ncell Customer Relations!

GSMA

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 14:41:00 +0000

Namaste! It was a great day with the launch of Ncell Pro which hopefully helps Nepalese to get to the next level of quality communications: we introduced a bundle package with the latest models of favourite 3G phones. You buy one of the phones you like and it comes fully loaded with SIM card, talk time and sms plus data package with some other goodies. Ramro cha!

Other recent highlight in the international mobile industry has been the nomination of TeliaSonera's President and CEO Mr. Lars Nyberg as a member of the board of GSMA. GSM Association is the main common body of operators, representing some 800 operators around the world in many development issues of the industry. Main event of the family, GSM World is held yearly in February at the beautiful city of Barcelona. But main achievements of GSMA has been the specs of GSM technology some 25 years ago. Actually, GSMA was born around the initiative of some Nordic companies who then run technology called Nordic Mobile Telefony (NMT). It was funny in the sence that when I drove with my car to other Nordic country, I had to switch to the country network. As we all do today. Thanks to Telia, Sonera, Ericsson,Nokia and couple of other companies for beeing innovative and seeing the needs for mobile communications. Actually, SMS was invented as a kind of signaling channel for network operations but mobile users widely started using the 160 characters to communicate each other: the big boom in Finland begun during the Ice Hockey World Championship in 1995. It was easy to send the scores and results to your friends not beeing present at the gallery, and naturally cost effectively. The father of the SMS is said to be Mr. Matti Makkonen, who worked at Finnish operator called Sonera as an engineer during those times.

Naturally all the nice things like roaming, interconnection to mention few have been developed between operators in multinational working groups. Couple of years ago I had an oppotunity to be part of mobile money initiative with operators, banks and handset manufactures. The initiative is about how to enable functionality of your everyday wallet in the mobile phone. How does it supposed to work? Well, the electronic wallet is an application in the SIM card, the information is transmitted to the wireless chip in the phone and you can pay your groceries by waving the phone close to the payment terminal of the point of sales. Money is deducted form your bank account or credit card, according your choice. Might be that in couple of years this could be mainstream like GSM...
http://gsmworld.com/index.htm

Quality International Calls

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 07:18:00 +0000

Last week I was visiting Istanbul, the city where we have our regional head office for Eurasian operations of TeliaSonera. In Istanbul we cross fertilize and steer the ventures in countries like Kazakstan (Kcell), Azerbaitzan (AcerCell), Tadjikistan (Tcell) etc...and naturally Ncell! Reason why I write this is that I felt so proud of Nepal and our operations: several times I took a call from Turkey to Nepal by mobile and as many times I had to ask my counterpart to call me back because I could not hear what he was talking about. In technical language, there was packet losses causing words to vanish into syperspace. In general language: it was a low quality operator involved transmitting the signal from Turkey to Nepal. But when a person took call from Ncell to Turkey, our guys had routed the signal to use our reliable partners outside Nepal to carry the voice all the way to my phone in Istanbul. Fantastic voice clarity!! And who are the partners?

We work as much as we can with our TeliaSonera Internatinal Carrier. We own and operate 43.000 kilomiters of fiber, have 100 point of presence in 35 countries across Americas, Europe and Asia. TeliaSonera runs a huge "spider net" of fiber where our calls and data is routed to the destination and back. Can you imagine what happens if the ILD is going to be regulated according to initiative of NTA?

You are going to be back in the same situation that we were two years back: quality of international calls will vanish, due to unprofessional carriers and cheap multirouting between countries. To make things even better, we are building more direct interconnections with more operators; now we cover more or less all the countries where Nepalese immigrants work, live and call back home to Nepal...using the best network of Ncell and international partners. If you interested in browsing more on TeliaSonera International Carrier, please follow the link: http://www.teliasoneraic.com/

Message from a remote village of Nepal

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 06:42:00 +0000

Hearth warming customer experience!

Dear Ncell,

I was recently gone for a trip to Jiri, Charikot, Singati for some company affairs. A lot of my work involved contact my colleagues here in Kathmandu, and I was supposed to send them reports. I was very nervous at first because I was not just supposed to send word files but high resolution photographs too.

I was skeptical about Ncell's performance at remote villages. Thankfully, I was able to get a lot of my work done online from remote Singati or Cherdung villages.

Thanks for your wonderful service and performance. This wouldn't have meant a lot if I was to use Ncell Internet in Kathmandu, but when you realise that you're still connected from the middle of nowhere - it means a lot.

Thank you.

Swapnil Acharya

Gai Jatra

noreply@blogger.com (Ncell) — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 14:30:00 +0000

Writing in the car with my iPad,heavy traffic because of festivals. Anyway,data traffic is good as always:). Actually, we had a drive test made on quality issues and happy to say that we are almost there when talking about a world class network: we have reached our targets in many Key Performance Indicators. For instance, we have five time less failed call attempts compared to our next competitor. Meaning that you reached you counterpart easily, which is naturally crucial part of good network. What it comes to data speed,we have an average of 1.1 Mb download with maximum 3,2 in peaks. No wonder Ncell connect is achieving more and more users. But as our CTO Aigars wrote about network challenges, we will face again the power related problems with load shedding times. To be in a better position next season, we add 50 more solar sites during becoming months.

During my absence from Nepal, our teams have made lot of improvements in several areas. When beeing in social media, I would like to emphasize that we have nominated dedicated people to answer on your requests in Facebook; the aim is to improve Ncell Customer experience also at the field of virtual networking. Please use the opportunity to talk with our Customer Relations officers "Face to Facebook"

Regards,
Pasi