As users complain of call drops and call lags, the government has asked Telecom companies to improve their standards by ‘focusing on improving capital expenditure and optimising resource utilisation to curb call drops,’ as stated by Business Standard.
“The projected acute shortage of towers due to non-cooperation of state government and local bodies can’t be accepted as a reason for the call drops in last four to six months as this problem has assumed severe proportion during this period,” it said.
A meeting was held on Tuesday with the Telecom Secretary Rakesh Garg and the CEOs of telecom service providers (TSP) and the main issue of call drops was discussed at length. Garg concluded the meeting by saying that the government was lending as much support as possible regarding ‘the issue of dispelling of unfounded fears from EMF radiation and other issues raised by TSPs.’
He also asked the TSPs to look into areas such as deployment of additional sites to ensure optimum coverage, use of geo-spatial tool for micro-analyzing time-spatial performance, real time network optimization and load balancing etc, which will all lead to the betterment of the QoS (Quality of service.)
In response, the operators have claimed an investment of Rs.134,000 crore, out of which Rs.24,000 crore is for capital equipment with a capital expenditure revenue ratio of 73% against global coverage of 12-18%.
The government issued another statement saying:
“There is an immediate requirement of rigorous optimisation exercise to be taken up by all service providers.”
Now that the operators have been picked up for not being able to deliver good service quality, they have assured the government that they will take action for optimisation of networks and do it on a regular basis, thereby improving the overall performance.
Let’s hope these aren’t false promises.
