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Business News/ Industry / Telecom/  Call drops: no end in sight
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Call drops: no end in sight

Call drops is now the center of a blame game between the govt and telecos, with both sides accusing the other of not doing enough

A recent survey by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India found that India has one of the worst call drop ratios in the world—around 12%, four times the globally acceptable 3%. Photo: Getty ImagesPremium
A recent survey by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India found that India has one of the worst call drop ratios in the world—around 12%, four times the globally acceptable 3%. Photo: Getty Images

New Delhi: The government says telecom service providers aren’t doing enough and that call drops have worsened in seven months. The telcos say they spend as much as 73% of revenue on infrastructure, as compared to 33% in China and 12-18% globally, and the government needs to do more in terms of a tower policy among other things.

If you’re a mobile phone user in the country, especially in a congested metro like Delhi or Mumbai, chances are you know what a call drop is, a little too well.

For others, a call drop essentially refers to an abrupt end to a phone conversation mid-syllable. This leaves you with two options: you either call back or you wait to get a call back. And if both sides decide to make that call, neither call will go through.

Chances are, it’s happening for every call you make. And you’ve come to avoid making long duration calls, choosing instead to email or instant message.

No wonder, the issue is now the centre of a blame game between the government and the service providers, with both sides accusing each other of not doing enough. While the telcos say the government needs to do more to enable the erection of towers (and provide more spectrum), the government accuses the telcos of not spending enough to build towers and improve the quality of services.

A recent survey by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) found that India has one of the worst call drop ratios in the world—around 12%, four times the globally acceptable 3%.

But what triggers these call drops?

Mobile phones work on spectrum, the same airwaves that enable us to listen to the radio or even use remote controls, but different in the fact that while one tower is enough to carry FM radio signals in a small city, mobile phones in a city like Delhi needs a few thousand towers.

A telco with less spectrum per subscriber will need more towers to alleviate the congestion in a network. And spectrum is a scarce resource in India, which has the second-largest mobile phone user base in the world with more than 975 million users. This means there’s a dire need for more towers to manage the increased congestion of more and more people using the same spectrum.

But with towers come another problem. Cancer-causing radiation concerns have discouraged people, especially in residential areas, from allowing towers on their property, leaving little area in crowded cities for the masts that enable the carriage of the radio signal needed for mobile phone services.

Cancer concerns are largely unfounded, however. India has the most stringent norms for radiation from telecom towers, set at one-tenth the limit set in most other countries. Due to these stringent norms, the need for more towers has also gone up: to reduce the radiation emanating from any one tower, more towers are needed.

The lack of a standard tower policy in the country has also led to arbitrary rules by various municipal bodies and other authorities, making erection of more towers difficult.

Of course, let’s not discount the rivalries between the telcos that dissuade them from sharing towers, or the fact that they would rather use spectrum for higher value data services, rather than basic voice, not that data services are phenomenally better.

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Published: 19 Aug 2015, 12:45 PM IST
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