A Sainik School alumnus, discipline is deeply ingrained in Bijender Yadav, a trait that has helped him rise up the corporate ladder quickly. Today, he is CTO at MTS India, a company he joined in 2009 and held several key positions in. Prior to his current role, he was leading the network planning and strategy function at the company. Commenting on the challenges before him, Yadav says, “The key issues for any CTO relate to network availability, finding the right locations for tower installations and dealing with frequent fibre cuts, which impact connectivity.”

His focus currently is on expanding MTS India’s existing infrastructure. In an environment where tower installations have become a challenge given the growing health concerns, the operator is looking to enhance its network capacity by adding more sectors in a coverage area. According to Yadav, the cellular network consists of multiple cell sites which are generally divided into three sectors to ensure an optimised network, thus addressing issues related to interference and coverage. However, in order to cater to the growing customer requirements on its network, MTS India is adding a fourth and a fifth sector to its existing sites by using specially designed antennas. Although the addition of sectors leads to some amount of interference in the network, it helps the operator overcome network capacity constraints. “We are also looking for more spectrum in order to meet the growing demand for data services. At present, MTS India has three CDMA carriers, of which two are being used for data services and one for voice services. In geographies where we do not have a significant number of voice customers, we transfer the customers to other cellular networks through intra-circle roaming pacts and use this carrier to provide data services, which are gaining traction in the country,” he says.

During a career spanning over 23 years, Yadav has worked with companies like Idea Cellular, Bharti Airtel and Tata Teleservices. He has had the opportunity to work on many challenging assignments. He identifies the launch of MTS India’s EVDO Rev B Phase II network in Jaipur in 2011 as his most memorable. It paved the way for MTS to deliver data download speeds of 9.8 Mbps and was challenging as it was the world’s first EVDO Rev B launch and entailed extensive research and testing.