 "Telecom companies cornered over call drops")
The last few months have seen a perceptible change in the way Indians communicate. Landline phones are back in use. Emails are preferred over phone calls. People rush out of offices whenever there is an urgent call on their cellphone. Angst at the quality of telecom services is high, thanks to the high frequency of unfinished calls, or call drops.
Everybody - from the government to telecom companies and subscribers - knows call drops is a huge problem but nobody knows its extent.
| REASONS FOR CALL DROPS |
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According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India's service performance indicators for January-March 2015, 23 mobile networks (2G) out of 183 across the country did not meet the 3 per cent benchmark for the traffic channel failure drop rate. Though this was an improvement compared to 25 networks in the quarter ended December 2014, there is no denying that the situation has gone from bad to worse.
"In some cases, the average hides the actual data," TRAI Chairman RS Sharma recently told Business Standard. "It is necessary to slice and dice the data. We need to do further analysis to assess the root cause of call drops." According to him, TRAI intends to map the quality of service of all telecom operators through geographical information systems to get the real picture.
The needle of suspicion points towards telecom companies - they are accused of under-investing in infrastructure including towers. After paying large sums of money for spectrum in auctions, it has been suggested that telecom companies are cutting down on other investments in order to shore up their profits.
Sharma says insufficient investment in infrastructure seems to be one of the main reasons for call drops. It is true that the infrastructure has not grown in tandem with the subscriber base.
Currently, there are around 425,000 towers across the country; experts say, another 100,000 to 200,000 are required for good coverage. A rooftop tower can cost Rs 10-15 lakh and a ground-based tower Rs 25-30 lakh. This shortage means a cap-ex saving of at least Rs 10,000 crore - not a small amount. According to a report by Deloitte, the tower network is expected to expand at a snail's pace - just 3 per cent per annum - to reach 511,000 by 2020. The portents are clearly ominous.
The other perspective
Still others say that since every new call means more revenue, call drops are actually being encouraged by the telecom companies. That can work when talk time is measured in packets of time, say 60 seconds. It so happens that most customers (well over 90 per cent) have moved to per-second billing. So there is really no incentive for telecom companies to disrupt calls frequently.
On their part, telecom companies say it is getting increasingly difficult to install towers. Thanks to radiation fears, house owners don't want to give their terraces on lease, in spite of the fact that the radiation norms in India are stricter than those in the United States and Switzerland.
On top of that, overzealous civic bodies have sealed towers with impunity, which has hampered services. Till date, as many as 10,000 towers have been sealed across the country: while 713 have been shut in Mumbai, 659 have gone off the network in Delhi. Many of these are at critical locations.
Communications & IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has written to all the state chief ministers and the urban development ministry to allow operators to install towers on government buildings. This request was accepted last week. Telecom companies now say that it will take them some time to put up towers at these sites - the work cannot be finished overnight.
Telecom companies also say their spectrum is bursting at its seams - the unprecedented boom in data traffic has made it worse. An executive from the industry says that in India, telecom companies have an average of 10.5 MHz spectrum, against the global average of 50 MHz spectrum. The new guidelines on spectrum sharing and spectrum trading should help ease the burden.
In search of a solution
A study conducted by Phimetrics Technologies in Delhi has thrown up some interesting facts. Two telecom operators, with a similar subscriber base as well as spectrum and towers, were found to have widely different call drop rates. This means that call drops have to do with other factors apart from spectrum and towers. The study also found that 36 per cent call drops happen in good network areas, 30 per cent inability-to-call events happen during off-peak hours, and 40 per cent of call-receive failures happen post-midnight.
This clearly points towards suboptimal utilisation of spectrum and tower infrastructure. There are cell sites in the open and inside buildings. More often, these networks don't talk to each other. That is why a majority of call drops happen inside buildings. That is also why many subscribers see their signal vanish temporarily when they walk out of a mall or step into an office complex.
This is a problem the telecom companies can fix. They need to make investments which result in better usage of their spectrum and infrastructure.
The matter of call drops got aggravated when Prime Minister Narendra Modi stepped in a month back and asked the telecom ministry to resolve the issue. Subsequently, Rakesh Garg, the telecom secretary, called a meeting of all telecom companies.
Sharma too met telecom CEOs and told them he will check their claims of improving network soon in Delhi and Mumbai. TRAI has issued a consultation paper on offering compensation to mobile users for call drops. It will also come up with an information paper citing the reasons and possible solutions for call drops.
While telecom companies have assured that things will improve, the government will take strict action, including penalties, if they don't, Prasad has said. The clock is ticking away.
