Call drops problem getting worse: TRAI needs a wake-up call

After a bull run of more than a decade, India's mobile growth story appears to be losing its sheen. The problem of call drops is causing widespread consumer dissatisfaction, making people reminisce about interruption-free conversations with landline phones. Call drop rate is a key quality benchmark for any telecom service. Norms require that once a call is made, it has to be carried in an assigned traffic channel and should not drop till it is terminated by the user.

The telecom regulator during its drive-tests in Mumbai and Delhi has found that call drop rates of most of the operators in these two cities is much higher than the benchmark of less than two percent. Call drop rate for one of the operators in Delhi was as high as 17.29 per cent.

Telephone companies blame spectrum crunch and shortage of towers for deteriorating quality of service. Well, these two factors are only part of the problem.

Data analysed by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) shows that investment by telecom operators in network infrastructure has not kept pace with growth in usage. The investment by telecom companies in wireless access services grew by 4.6 per cent between 2012-13 and 2013-14, whereas the minutes of usage grew by 6.8 per cent during the same period. Clearly, it is more than the towers and radiation fears.

Solution to call drops lies in improving efficiency and in implementing creative regulatory and technological options. Scientists say that "spectrum is a finite resource" is a myth propagated by telecom companies to hide inefficient use of available spectrum and invest miserly in technology. Radio spectrum utility is limited only by efficiency of equipment used to transmit and receive signals.

A plethora of new technologies - both hardware and software - are available and are emerging to optimise radio spectrum and carry voice and data traffic more efficiently. Spectrum sharing and trading, which has been permitted by the government recently, is could boost proper utilisation of unused bandwidth. There are other ways too. Allowing in-building operators in dense urban pockets can help improve mobile service quality. This means calls made and received within buildings need not travel on networks outside the building. Intra-circle roaming in home network should be permitted.

This means you should be free to switch to another operator if your operator is not able to prevent call drops, even within home network just like when you do while roaming in another circle. This will force telecom companies to improve their services in areas that experience frequent call drops. Mobile companies should also be allowed to use unlicensed spectrum like the one used in WiFi hotspots.

Instead of focusing on innovative solutions to problem of call drops, the TRAI wants companies to compensate customers for inconvenience caused due to call drops. Consumers may like some extra minutes or seconds in lieu of calls disrupted, but what about annoyance caused or business lost due to poor quality of service? Is compensation only answer to poor quality of service or we need to work towards eliminating the problem of call drops?