Trai receives most complaints against Airtel for call drops

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has received the highest number of complaints for call drops against Bharti Airtel, followed by Vodafone, Idea Cellular and BSNL till June this year.

There were 31 complaints of call drops against Airtel, 17 against Vodafone and 10 each for BSNL and Idea Cellular, minister for communications and information technology Ravi Shankar Prasad said in a written reply in the Lok Sabha.

Call drop can occur due to various reasons, including insufficient coverage due to paucity of mobile towers and handover failure due to network congestion on account of more users in a particular area.

However, on Tuesday, according to a Trai survey, Bharti Airtel emerged the best mobile network with least number call drops in Mumbai roads while in Delhi, Tata (CDMA) was the best network in the same criteria, according to a two-day drive test conducted by the regulator.

In Mumbai, the call drop rate for Airtel was the least at 0.97 per cent, while the highest was for Idea Cellular at 5.56 per cent. Except for one operator, no operator is meeting the prescribed benchmark, TRAI said.

However, TRAI said the main limitations of a Drive test are that it is based on the data collected at a specific point in time.



Also, it shows the network conditions/performance only along the route covered by the Drive test vehicle and does not reflect the long term performance of the networks nor does it reflect the network conditions away from the route covered. In national capital, Tata (CDMA) emerged as the best with just 0.84 per cent call drop rate. While maximum was recorded for Reliance at 17.29 per cent.

"As per TRAI’s regulations, TRAI has been monitoring the performance for service providers against the quality of service benchmarks for the various parameters through quarterly performance monitoring reports," Prasad said. The call drop rate should be less than 2 per cent, according to the TRAI benchmark.

"According to service providers, the common reasons attributed to call drops are equipment faults, frequent load shedding in some circles, difficulty in site acquisition, shutting of existing mobile towers due to radiation concerns and restrictions near international border," he said.

The department of telecom has asked TRAI to give its views as to whether the customers can be compensated for dropped calls.

“Meetings with telecom service providers have been held in April as well as second week of July, 2015 on the call drop issue, wherein they have been asked to take immediate measures to address issues of call drops by radio frequency optimisation, installation of new sites and in-building solutions,” Prasad added.