Telecom minister to meet telco CEOs on Tuesday

Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha will meet chief executives officers of telecom firms on Tuesday to take stock of the call drop issue and discuss a road map, telecom secretary J S Deepak said in New Delhi.

On June 10, telcos had given a 100-day plan on a strategy to address the call drop issue. They had committed to set up 60,000 base stations as part of this plan.

By July 26, the operators had installed 48,000 mobile towers across the country while committing to add 100,000 in one year.

Deepak said that, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), there had been an improvement in the call-drop situation.

"Trai says 54 networks were not performing up to standard in October 2015; now it's down to 19," he said.

In an earlier review meeting on call drop problem in July, the minister had expressed satisfaction but also stressed that customers should feel improvement in service quality.

The minister had emphasised the need for improved planning by modern approaches such as geographic information systems for network planning, frequency tuning, automatic frequency plan tools, and drive tests to check interference.