Customer experience in telecom is won by ensuring a premium-grade Quality of Experience.

Ask a mobile subscriber what they think of their quality of experience and you will rarely hear about spectrum, backhaul or site density. You will hear about the call that dropped mid-sentence. The single bar of signal inside their own office. The voice on the other end that kept breaking up. The banking transaction that could not be completed.

Every problem in a mobile network eventually reaches the user as one of three things: slow application, a dropped session, or no signal at all. And it tends to show up where people gather, which is exactly where the network is under the most strain. A packed stadium at kick-off. A metro platform at six in the evening. An office tower whose concrete does more to block a signal than any distance from the mast.

For years, the industry’s answer has been to build more. More sites, more spectrum, more capacity. That answer is now running into two limits at once. Spectrum is expensive and finite. And the places where experience breaks down are often places a new tower was never going to fix.

Offloading was always the wrong word

Wi-Fi offload has been part of operator strategy for more than a decade, and the word tells you how it was thought of. Wi-Fi was somewhere to push surplus traffic when the “real” network got crowded. Users felt that framing. They were sent to captive portals, asked to log in, and dropped mid-session during the handover.

At IO by HFCL, we think of it as right-loading. The aim is to put each subscriber’s traffic on the radio access network can serve them best at that moment, and to make the switch so transparent that they never know about it.

That aim shapes what gets built. Passpoint authentication runs against the operator’s own AAA server, so the move from 4G/5G to Wi-Fi (or the other way round) happens mid-call, without any portal-based login. The radio layer retunes its own power, channels and band steering as a crowd builds, so the network continues to perform when demand peaks instead of buckling under it.

None of this is visible to the person holding the phone. That is the whole idea. Wi-Fi delivered this way stops behaving like a fallback and starts behaving like an integral part of the operator’s access network infrastructure.

What it takes to be invisible

Making the underlying network complexity disappear from the subscriber’s view is hard engineering. Every decision in our architecture answers one question: what would the customer otherwise have to deal with?

The first answer is the handover itself. It was the moment users disliked most: the portal, the wait for SMS-based one-time password, the video that froze as the phone switched networks. Our platform is built on carrier-grade user onboarding standards (Hotspot 2.0 and Passpoint), and it authenticates the device directly against the operator’s own AAA infrastructure. The phone moves from cellular to Wi-Fi mid-session, and the call, the stream or the payment simply carries on.

Crowds are the next problem. A network designed for average load fails at the peak, which is exactly when people notice. So, the radio layer manages itself. Auto channel selection, adaptive transmit power control, smart load balancing and band steering, seamless roaming operate in real time across thousands of access points, utilizing radio resources as per the demand.

Most networks still learn about problems from user complaints. Our NMS and IO Canvas platform track quality-of-experience indicators, connection failures and anomalies across every site, access point and client. A degrading access point is caught and fixed before a subscriber feels it, and operations shift from firefighting to prevention.

Experience and economics are the same problem

Our industry has a habit of treating customer experience as a cost and network economics as a constraint, then trading one against the other. I think that habit is out of date.

Industry benchmarks put Wi-Fi’s cost per bit at roughly half that of LTE. Every gigabyte an operator right-loads is a gigabyte it didn’t have to carry on licensed spectrum it paid for, or on a base station it had to deploy. That saving can go straight back to the customer as more generous plans, faster upgrades, or coverage in places that would never justify a new site.

The churn side of the ledger is just as clear. Ericsson’s ConsumerLab research (2023) found that subscribers who get poor connectivity at high-footfall venues are up to three times more likely to switch providers within six months. Stadiums, airports and transit hubs are exactly where right-loading does its work. Fixing coverage there is a retention strategy, and a cheaper one than winning the customer back.

Speed of change matters too. Operators can’t wait years for a core replacement before experience improves. So, our access points work with any standards-based mobile core. We have also back-ported Passpoint Release 3.0 and WPA3 to first-generation Wi-Fi 5 hardware, so an operator’s existing base gets the benefit, not only the sites on new equipment. The gap between decision and better experience is measured in weeks.

Forty-five days at the MahaKumbh

The real test of any of this is a crowd that doesn’t let up. We got ours at the MahaKumbh Mela 2025.

Over 45 days, 660 million pilgrims passed through a temporary city at Prayagraj. That is more than twice the population of the United States, on a site with no permanent infrastructure and no second chance. HFCL’s mobile data offload and wireless backhaul carried their connectivity.

Daily active connections grew twenty-fold, from about 10,000 in the opening days to more than 200,000 at peak. Daily data went from 150 GB to over 2.7 TB. At the busiest moments, with more than 250,000 people connected at once, the network held 99.9% uptime with no critical outage. Band steering kept over 80% of connections on 5 GHz in the densest zones.

The number I come back to is a different one. For more than two million people, the Kumbh was their first experience of fast, reliable internet. Many used it to livestream a sacred moment to family thousands of kilometres away. Nobody asked them to sign in first.

The next frontier has walls

The same platform now runs every day for India’s largest mobile operator. It serves more than 515 million subscribers across 50,000-plus access points, reaches five to six million unique users a day, and right-loads around 65% of traffic in its active zones.

At that scale, the next problem is easy to see. A base of 253 million 5G users now expects the same throughput in a mall, a hospital or an office campus that they get on the street. Cellular signal is weakest indoors, and indoors is where people spend most of their day. An experience strategy for half a billion subscribers cannot treat a wall as an edge case.

That is why we build indoor and outdoor Wi-Fi as one continuous architecture across Wi-Fi 5, 6 and 7. It is also why we are taking this approach beyond India, to operators across the UK, the US, Europe and Africa.

The question worth asking

For a long time, our industry measured itself on coverage maps and peak speeds. Those still matter. But customers don’t experience a coverage map. They experience the moment the network either holds or lets them down.

So here is the question I would put to any operator planning its next three years: where are your subscribers losing faith in you, and how many of those places can a tower actually fix? In our experience, it is fewer than the capex plan assumes.

The best thing a customer can say about a network is that they never had to think about it. It is a demanding standard, and the right one.