LIVE FROM GSMA MOBILE ASIA CONGRESS 2011: Operators can always make use of additional spectrum, Uninor COO Yogesh Malik told the Show Daily before his appearance at Mobile Asia Congress on Thursday. “Sufficient in itself can never be enough. I have seen when companies have more than 10MHz spectrum and they still want more (though the utilisation is not high enough),” he said.

Uninor – which is a joint venture between Indian property group Unitech and Norwegian operator Telenor formed in 2009 – has 4.4MHz of spectrum which supports around 30 million subscriptions in India and carries 6TB of data each day. The operator is eligible for a further 1.8GHz of spectrum.

“We continuously maximise this very scarce resource and balance the customer offerings with network load using technologies/advanced radio planning on the sites and using pricing techniques,” Malik added.  Uninor focuses data for emails and browsing rather than videos and streaming due to the amount of spectrum it licenses. This limited amount of spectrum also means Uninor can’t subsidise data or devices. It therefore needs to make data services relevant to customers while optimising networks for better data transfer rates.

“There is a clear opportunity to drive revenue by giving data services, provided industry in India does not repeat the same mistakes as in Europe by driving huge subsidies without focusing on relevance and profitability,” Malik said.

Uninor is currently focused on reducing the average cost per minute on its network to levels similar to more established operators as it chases positive EBITDA by 2013. This requires “continuous focus on simplification and driving customer centricity in the organisation by focusing on what matters most to the customers," according to Malik.

This means approaches such as dynamic pricing for balancing competitive pricing with network load, and ensuring that it employs more efficient “one screen resolution” for customer complaints.

Malik said Uninor’s future network roadmap will aim to maximise numerous technologies as it focuses on “spectrum efficiency, virtualisation [and] simplification of architecture through transformational partnership with our key partners.”

Innovation in processes, business models and organisation is also key, according to Malik. “By breaking the conventional wisdom, we have been able to achieve more than 30 percent higher spectrum efficiency than several established operators,” he said.

Uninor has been able to “capture growth” in core value added services such as SMS, data browsing and emails. For “long-tail” value added services based on service delivery platforms, Uninor has a partnering strategy, which Malik says removes inhouse complexity, reducing costs and time to market.