Trai to decide on penalty for call drops: Ravi Shankar Prasad

Chairman Ram Sewak Sharma met Prasad on Friday to discuss various issues, including call drops

The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has asked telecom regulator Trai to design a framework that will look at arresting call drops and decide whether erring operators need to be penalised.

In an interview with Business Standard, Minister for Communications and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad said, “This is a serious issue. A proper architecture has to be framed to deal with call drops and Trai will examine this and suggest ways, including whether penalty has to be imposed on telecom players.”

Mobile subscribers face frequent call drops and the situation has worsened over the last few months, forcing the government to step in. New Trai Chairman Ram Sewak Sharma met the minister this morning to discuss call drops among other issues.

“It (call drops) is a serious issue….it is indeed an issue which impinges on telecom operators’ credit worthiness. Operators need to optimise their networks and reinforce their systems,” Prasad said.

While taking charge on Monday, Sharma said the issue of call drops would be dealt with on priority. “We will introduce new technologies to determine the root cause of various problems. Call drops, for example, is something we can analyse with the help of technology and suggest possible solutions,” said Sharma.

Calls drop for various reasons: few cell towers, congested networks, scarcity of spectrum, and fears of radiation.

Prasad made it clear that the operators would have to improve their infrastructure. “Voice can’t be the casualty of high growth in data services,” he said.

He said the department had been taking proactive measures to resolve certain issues, such as installation of in-building solutions, tower sites in government buildings and talking to state governments for setting up more tower sites. “The spectrum sharing guidelines will also help operators to reduce call drops.”

When it was pointed out that telecom companies were disappointed over spectrum sharing norms, he said if an operator had acquired spectrum at the market price it could not be shared with spectrum of another operator that received the spectrum at an administrative price bundled with a licence. This week, the government gave its go-ahead to the much-awaited spectrum sharing guidelines.

Earlier, DoT had also asked Trai to suggest a scheme on call drops. Uninor is the only operator that compensates its users for dropped calls. For every call drop, Uninor subscribers get one minute credited to their account. Also, the DoT conducted a special audit to assess coverage and quality of service of all telecom players in the metros. Telecom players have been regularly updating the department on various actions they have been taking to arrest call drops, including upgradation of their capacity as well as network expansion.