Subir Roy: Telecom saga comes full circle

My friend for more years than I can count was on the line, as he is every other day. All went according to routine - which is not to say that all went well. By the time we finished with the pleasantries, the usual troubles began. The line was so unclear that we kept on asking each other if we could hear each other. Then, for a few seconds at a time I could hear nothing at all and finally total silence took over. The call had dropped.

This has been happening for a few years now, ever since he moved into an 11th-floor flat in an upmarket development. All's well with most of the facilities except that talking to him on his mobile phone is bad at the best of times and worse than bad when times get worse.

We have lived with this till now except that lately things have got worse. Odd, because we had earlier assumed that things couldn't get worse. My gratuitous advice to him has taken the following course: change your service provider; now that there is number portability, what are you waiting for; and finally, shift to another apartment complex if your neighbours using other service providers also face the same problem.

The disease afflicting mobile communications is not restricted to a city or a particular corner of it, I realised recently when I started to upbraid our son for not keeping in touch - only to be told that the marvellous wooded campus he was lucky to live in, right in the heart of South Delhi, was the absolute pits when it came to using mobile phones. So when he wanted to talk to us he had to take a longish walk to exit the main gate and stand on the street pavement. I was left speechless which was just as well because the sound of traffic made talking a torture.

During my college days when the telephone at our home would be dead most of the time, to make a call I would have to walk a few minutes to the corner medicine shop to use their phone, and there wait for my turn as there was usually a queue. On keeping conversations short and to the bare minimum, I thought that today things were getting close to the days of the telex or the primeval telegraph (dot, dash, dash it…).

All I could do was recall how in covering the Assam agitation in the early 1980s the easiest part was typing out the story in the Guwahati hotel room latest by 7 PM. Then came the long wait at the telegraph office for the story to be "taped" (keyed in) and "run" (sent). When I got my copy of the scroll of paper, that was my story, I looked not at the head but the tail for the magic words: how recd; well recd; ok, tks, tks. My exchanges with our son these days are often as cryptic: Baba, how are you; great, of course; ok, take care. Out.

What seems like the final straw was trying to call an old contact in a Jharkhand company town where telecom services should be tip-top. as the executive types there generate generous revenues. By the time we finished exchanging pleasantries, I realised that getting the coke rate or the energy rate figures accurately was out and I offered to call him again on my landline. Then things truly went back three decades, to when phone lines were more dead than alive. Mine wasn't dead except that every time I dialled I got an infuriating recorded message asking me to check the STD code I had dialled. There was little comfort in knowing, after hunting down his visiting card, that I had not, after all, got the STD code wrong.

We appear to have come full circle or even worse. First, there was only an atrocious state-owned landline telephone system whose ills were attributed to being state-owned. Then when mobile phones came, calling on them cost a bomb - but at least the essential conversations were taken care of. Then, over time, as costs have gone down and the mobile phone has become ubiquitous, being able to finish a conversation satisfactorily has become more and more difficult.

The minister has said shortage of spectrum is not an excuse and the matter of call drops "needs addressing on a priority basis". (He's been in the seat for a year now!) The telecom firms' association has insisted spectrum is an issue, "being a law of physics, we can't do much." Also, there are the hassles in setting up towers with people fearing radiation hazards, and getting fleeced for obtaining right of way. The regulator has said it will soon raise penalties for not meeting the requisite service quality. New norms are "work in progress". How soon is soon?

Could it be that after paying a bomb for spectrum at the auctions, the firms want to repair their bottom line and reduce debt a bit before expanding infrastructure to take care of the increasing traffic, service quality be blown? (Years ago, European telecom firms did not have money to pay for their coffee for some time after bidding for spectrum for 3G services.) Government, industry and regulator all know the reality very well and are mouthing inanities to simply pass the buck.

subirkroy@gmail.com