The Telecom User V/S The Cricketer: Who Performs Better?

Cricketers and mobile phone users are subject to a stack of analytics of late (Photo: Philip Brown / Reuters)

I am an English cricket fan, married to an Australian and currently Down Under on holiday while the Poms are taking a serious whacking in the Ashes. Alas, I too live with the realisation that I would rather be a cricket correspondent than a telecom expert, and so, in line with 2012’s year-end blog, humour me again by reading what I have to say about who does better – the Cricketer or the Telecom User?

1. Tours: Cricketers as well as telecom users get a rough deal When I was in Brisbane, copping major Aussie flack for being a faint-hearted Pommie who can’t play fast bowling, I thought let me get overseas touring out of the way. 'Homeys' they are not, but cricketers have long preferred their own backyard to playing overseas in unfamiliar climes, and often touring without families. Bounce, spin, swing, the texture of light, the moisture in the air, the seam of the cricket ball, the direction of the breeze and who knows what else, are all supposedly different overseas. As a result, very few (like the legendary Muttiah Muralitharan) have better records overseas than at home. Despite the unmatched luxuries of Indian hotels, English squads complain of a 'Delhi belly' every time they tour the subcontinent. Basically, cricketers on tour can be fish out of water.

Thanks to exorbitant tariffs, which secretly add up to your account while you merrily call all and sundry on a holiday, telecom users don’t tour too well either. Leave mobile data switched on when overseas, and financially you would be better off being mugged in a dark alley. Once bitten, 'roaming' is a horror to which you will be twice shy forever. So much margin is made by operators from roaming revenues that a profitable side industry has been able to come up to relieve harassed travellers by offering cheaper rates.  Recently, the European Commission ruled that in EU countries excessive roaming charges will be phased out, arguing that operators have long used the super-normal profits to cross-subsidise other services given away too cheap.

So, like cricketers, telecom tourists eventually rack up far fewer numbers on tour than they do at home. Touring batsmen gasp in trepidation of facing a Mitchell Johnson on a bouncy track at Perth. The telecom user’s demon, however arrives in the form of a letter a month after returning home and it goes by the name of William Shock, or 'bill', for short. As the world becomes more village-like, telcos could do more to make our itinerant lives a bit easier.

2.  Movement in the air: balls talk, but calls don’t seem to
Zaheer Khan, Wasim Akram and James Anderson are all sultans of swing, moving the ball sideways through the air as it reaches the batsman, making a “moving ball talk".  But telcos can’t seem to make a moving call talk quite as well! The number of call drops endured while on the move in a busy metro is not funny. Odd that coming from a mobile operator. We can even predict the spot where calls will drop: My favourites being a certain stretch of NH-8 in Gurgaon and a stretch of Delisle Road in Lower Parel (Mumbai).  A telco COO told me this is partly due to towers being decommissioned on public pressure, leaving behind connection black spots. Mumbai apparently has 900 fewer sites than from two years ago.

3. Drops: Telecom Users get dropped more often than Monty Panesar!
Telecom users and cricketers are often dropped, but who fares worse when in this?

When a catch is dropped, cricketers are offered a lot more 'help' than when a phone call is dropped. Scupper a chance in a Test match, and within seconds you will be shown slo-mo replays of whether it was a catch at all, the softness of his palms at the moment of contact with the ball, his trouser tightness at the moment the knee bent, whether a twitch of his nose distracted him, and just about anything else. If your call is dropped, however, don’t hold your breath waiting for an SMS from your operator explaining why it happened, offering to reconnect you at their cost or apologising for the drop in the first place. Network connectivity is a long way from becoming a personalised and quality assured service, which is odd since it is after all the basic that telecos promise to offer: continuous connectivity with no call drops.

4. Scams: Cricketers and telecom can’t get away with it anymore
If you illicitly acquired a 2G licence recently, you can expect to have had it cancelled by the country’s apex court.  Thanks to the Government’s desperation for revenue though, you could buy the spectrum back at the next auction, shell out a few hundred crores, and rapidly return to business as usual. Services haven’t been too affected and so telecom users remain cushioned from impact for the time being. On the other hand, if you are a crafty (or unthinkably gullible) cricketer looking to profit from a touch of spot-fixing, you can expect nothing short of public humiliation and a long ban. Just ask Mohd Azharauddin and you'll know that once banned is (generally) forever banished.

5. Speed: Broken arms and broken promises
We live in an express cricketing age courtesy Dale Steyn, Mohammed Shami and that mustachioed left-armer who torpedoes a cricket ball at your throat at 95 mph, Mitchell Johnson. Speed has become cricket’s threat of a broken arm. On the contrary, in Indian telecom, speed is the industry’s broken promise. Enthusiastically we sign up to the Mbps equivalent of a Curtly Ambrose, but have to make do with that of a Madan Lal with a short run up, and a Bishen Bedi when the service is throttled once you reach your Gb/month limit. When the 1,800 MHz auctions are done in January 2014, let’s bring on 4G LTE, fit hawk-eye systems in telecom towers, and start breaking some speed limits.

6. Equipment: Self-protection versus groovy experience
Cricketers and telecom users carry a lot of kit nowadays, but for very different reasons.  In sport, it’s a matter of survival and the equipment is all defensive: Pads, helmets and to protect the crown jewels – the box. For telecom users, equipment is less self-preservation and more about creating the experience: Earpieces, running apps and fancy-coloured phone covers are de rigeur.  The telecom user wants to get his voice across more clearly, whereas the cricketer wants to ensure his voice doesn’t end up becoming permanently high-pitched.

7.  Auctions: Minnows take all the cash
Thanks to 3G and IPL, auctions are frequent in telecom as well as cricket but each one seems distinct. Major metros command top values in spectrum auctions, whereas unknown “minnows” command the highest prices in IPL bids: The top-valued players at IPL 6 were Maxwell, Richardson and Senanayake, who, with all due respect, are the telecom circle equivalents of UP, Odisha and Assam.

On further inspection though, the dynamics are revealed to be the same. Both drive valuations by relying on the difference between potential value and currently tapped value. Mumbai would command less in an auction when the revenue the spectrum can support has already been allocated. Similarly, even though a Virat Kohli may be more valuable, a Kane Richardson may have more untapped value worth paying for today.

8.  Analytics: Big Data will trump the anoraks
Cricketers and mobile phone users are subject to a stack of analytics of late. A Test cricketer's every move (on the pitch, that is) is reviewed microscopically, from scoring rates to run outs, to the angle at which one’s bat falls and whether the run up of a bowler is lop-sided or not. In telecom, every subscriber's minute-by-minute usage is monitored: Where we call from, to which number, how often, on which handset, what time of day or night, at what tariff etc. This is then used to generate deals sometimes known as “More for More” (i.e, you pay more, and we’ll give you even more).

But while cricket analytics is comfortably cocooned in its own amazing world of statistics and comparison, it remains historic, backward-looking and not particularly predictive. Telecom, however, is attempting to break out of its boundaries and go the Big Data way. Telcos aspire to combine usage information with insights into what we eat, who we are married to and what is the colour of our clothes on a Monday. And they want to use that to work out more about who we are and what we are prepared to pay for so that they can offer us “Even more, for a hell of a lot more.”

Once the ability to intelligently process social media feeds with usage statistics from the network is achieved, telecom and cricket analytics may go their separate ways. Unless one day Harsha Bhogle starts explaining that VVS Laxman scored 281 at Kolkata in 2000-01 because the calories he gained from eating uttapam every morning between the ages of 18 and 25 fructified into a 7 percent stamina increase at the age of 26.

Wishing you a peaceful, safe and healthy 2014!

(Follow me on Twitter @mtchowdhury)

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.