NEW DELHI: To deal with the growing menace of call drops, leading telecom operators, including Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio, have committed to investing over Rs 74,000 crore to upgrade and expand their infrastructure, Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan said on Tuesday.
“Bharti Airtel said that they have invested Rs 16,000 crore on infrastructure and will be spending another Rs 24,000 crore. Reliance Jio said that they will invest Rs 50,000 crore in the coming fiscal. Idea Cellular and Vodafone also committed to increasing mobile towers in their network,” Sundararajan said, adding that operators raised issue of non-availability of sites for installing mobile towers.
Not just unavailability of space, the burden to manage voice calls per tower has also increased. “Around 400 callers use a mobile tower during same time in India whereas in countries like China and others, this average is in the range of 200-300. They are now discussing with equipment makers to handle this kind of issue,” Sundararajan said.
The operators in their presentation to the Department of Telecom showed that even though call drops have stabilised, other problems like fading of voice call have increased due to various issues including some mobile phones not complying with required certification norms.
“Telecom operators said that the call drop problem in mobile phones without Global Conformity Framework certificate is more compared to the certified devices... We will look into enforcing rules more stringently,” she said.
Over the past two years, quality of service, particularly the quality of voice has remained a burning issue. There have been numerous talks between the government, the regulator and the telcos to solve the call drop issues but definite conclusion never came up. Earlier this month, DoT asked companies to get their act together to tackle the call drop issue.
According to telecom operators, data usage has grown 6-7 times and continues to grow 20-25 per cent every month; however, the stupendous growth in voice traffic has increase load on networks.
Telcos put the blame on other operators for the degrading call quality which forced Trai, to come up with strict rules. As per the new rules, the operators may face a maximum penalty of Rs 10 lakh for call drops, which will now be measured at mobile tower level instead of telecom circle level.