At that time, Docomo was good mainly because of its plans. The network was not too great, but it was as good as one could expect from a company just launched. It was not there in basements, lifts, remote areas and in some buildings, for example Manipal Hospital was one place where it wasn’t there in almost half the places inside the building.

But things were manageable and with the speed Docomo was putting their towers, I had expected that maximum within a year they’d have network as good as Airtel or Vodafone.

Guess I was wrong.

When my office shifted to Outer Ring Road, a few kms from Marathahalli Bridge, I was surprised to know that the network wasn’t there in almost half of the building. And then, in the lab, there were absolutely zero network for Docomo. But what is more surprising here is that the case is the same even today, almost a year and a half later. Just to clear any doubt, I’d like to mention here that Airtel, Vodafone, and even Reliance have network access throughout my office. Haven’t checked about others though.

But then, this is not exactly the reason I am writing this post. Almost everyone in my office and home knows that when in lab, I am not reachable, and I am quite okay with that.

The real frustration comes out when problems get bigger than this. For example, in the past few months, I have seen network access completely going at the center of Marathahalli Bridge repeatedly, and for more than ten, fifteen minutes. Ironically, some of the biggest Ranbir Kapoor posters claiming no getting away from network can be found within range of two kms.

Also, it frustrates me when every time at the HAL airport road, my network goes if I am talking. On the best days, only my voice breaks, while on an average day, call gets disconnected.

But then again, things still have to go over the top.

Earlier, Docomo gave a service where they used to give you detail of calls you missed. Now, Docomo has decided to charge for the service. Now that is again something fine enough, as long as you miss these calls because you switch off the phone. But what generally happens, is that DoCoMo’s unomnipresent network goes, sometimes when you highly need it (else, I wouldn’t even know it has gone, mostly) and there are tries to make calls, up and down, and then after some time DoCoMo network comes back and tells you that you have missed some call and if you pay 25 paise, you can get to know who called you.

So if you simplify the whole situation, you see that now a company can ask you for money because their network is bad, and call it a value add service.

Besides, I have had some good experiences with DoCoMo customer care in the past, when my money was immediately returned when I was once charged for something I had not asked for. The good part here also was that I have been charged extra only once in all this time, while such things are quite common with other operators. But then, recently there was a strange experience when a customer care person refused to tell me whether a particular package was available anymore and asked me to call the IVRS.

When I tried to contact DoCoMo on Twitter with some of these problems, the only answer I was given was to contact a nodal officer. On specifically asking whether not telling about packages through customer care was by design, there was no response from Twitter DoCoMo.

In short, while I enjoyed the services of DoCoMo for the first year and even after that, now the services, instead of getting better, are getting worse, and DoCoMo too seems to be turning into a money monster, even though not to the extents I have faced in case of other operators, not yet. But then, when compared to others, there are enough of problems with DoCoMo which may lead to me shifting to some other operator one day or the other. Don’t know if DoCoMo would mind letting their day one customers go, though I am sure I would not very much like it.

Reliance gets the credit of getting us phones for Rs 500. Reliance gets the credit for forcing phone manufacturers to reduce their prices too. Reliance made calls cheap enough for an anybody to talk on phone. And when BSNL joined in, telecommunication in India truly expanded as even villages got cellular coverage.

But it’s been years since there was no progress in the telecom sector other than hopping increases in the number of subscribers every month. Yes, we have more than

35 crore GSM and more than 10 crore CDMA subscribers today. But other than that, there was a silence in the market. A Raja’s only scheme since he joined the ministry, Mobile Number Portability or MNP, was showing no signs of starting and his claims to reduce call rates to 20-30 paisa were lost somewhere.

And then came DoCoMo. The day DoCoMo was launched in Bangalore, the schemes said Rs 49 for SIM with lifetime validity, 1 p/sec calls anywhere and 100 free msgs anywhere in India after first msg for the day charged. In short, I had no reason for not buying a DoCoMo as I already had two phones. I put the DoCoMo SIM on my old set on day 1, and within a week, my Airtel was on a backfoot.

No, DoCoMo wasn’t the best thing on the earth. It showed me Network Busy signal and made me talk to ‘aunty’ from my childhood who always used to say ‘is route ki sabhi linein vyast hain, kripaya thodi der baad dial karen/ all the lines to the route dialled by you are busy, please dial after some time’ back then. But then it was only during the evenings, and I had started feeling the difference in my phone bills already. Yes, DoCoMo was something for sure.

I guess similar thoughts striked many people and DoCoMo added record number of customers in the very first month, more than 1.8 million. I’m trying to find more recent data but since COAI doesn’t yet show the data for DoCoMo, recent statistics are not available. But then, the numbers must have been obviously significant as Reliance reduced its call rates to 50 paisa/min across India to stay in competition and one by one, every company, including Airtel who had stated they won’t jump into this price war, made their call rates 1 paisa per second.

Interesting part is that the same thing, that is 1p/sec, when tried with CDMA had failed and Tata Indicom didn’t get even half the success that GSM is enjoying. That explains the mature mindset of Indian customer who is ready to experiment but not ready to commit himself for lifetime with one cellphone operator.

Now the question that comes to my mind is that with such low ARPUs, how much will the telecom companies be able to earn and how much sustainable this change is. Surely all these companies who claim to be ‘barely surviving’ must be earning something otherwise there is no explanation for the huge number of competitors for new licences. But then, the way competition is increasing in all fields of Telecom (read DTH and IPTV after that), things are surely going to be difficult for mobile operators. My guess is broadband is one thing where these companies might find scope and can hope for a larger share of revenues in coming future, but for that they’ll have to be ready in advance. May be before DoCoMo launches a Rs 1/day plan or something.