DoT to approach Trai for action on call drops

Call drops occur due to paucity of mobile towers, network congestion caused by a larger number users in a given area

The department of telecommunications (DoT) will soon approach the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) for action on the issue of call drops.

The special audit report by a cell under DoT to assess coverage and service quality of mobile phone operators in metro cities has come. “We are analysing it. Subsequently, it would be shared with Trai to ascertain the action to be taken,” said DoT secretary Rakesh Garg.

 

Earlier, DoT had approached Trai to suggest a disincentive mechanism to tackle the problem. DoT has been meeting telecom companies in recent months, asking them for steps such as radio frequency optimisation, installation of new sites and in-building solutions.

DoT officials met service providers on Thursday, too. The latter gave reports on what they’d done. They say they've been adding sites and trying to install more. Capacity addition is on at existing sites by augmenting radio resources and the like.

 

Bharti Airtel said in Delhi it had added 100 2G and 100 3G sites in a month, apart from capacity addition on various sites. Vodafone added 190 sites in Delhi in June-July; Idea Cellular added 3,700 2G sites in the past four months across the country. Others gave reports, too.

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

 

Trai has been monitoring the performance of service providers against quality of service benchmarks. The call drop rate should be less than two per cent, by the Trai benchmark. Telcos have been attributing call drops to lesser numbers of tower sites and the difficulty in installing new towers due to citizens’ fear of radiation.