Telcos question Trai's call drop test

There seems to be no end to the face-off between the telecom companies and Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) over the call drop issue.

After slugging it out in the courts last few months, where the telcos won, they are engaged in a spat again with both pointing finger at the other for the high rate of abrupt mobile call termination in Delhi- National Capital Region (NCR).

A day after the sector regulator released the results of an independent drive test carried out in May in Delhi-NCR, showing that most telecom operators were not adhering to its benchmark less-than-2% call drop rate, the industry association Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) rejected it.

"The QoS (quality of service) results from the test driveare not strictly comparable with the standard QoS for dropped calls regularly published by Trai for the entire service area," it said in a statement issued by it.

The industry lobby body called the outcome of the drive test flawed as it covered a very small area and largely focused on "problematic" areas like Dwarka, Central Delhi, IGI Airport, Gurgaon-Manesar and Noida-Mayur-Vihar of the Delhi-NCR. It pointed out only 600 kilometre (km) of the total 46,208 km area of Delhi-NCR was covered for the test.

"To get a fair and an accurate picture, the issue of QoS and call drops has to be seen in a holistic manner for the entire LSA (license service area) and not only for selected samples or areas," stated the COAI in the statement issued by it.

The industry body was countering Trai's drive test results that showed that all 3G and 2G networks of Bharti Airtel and MTNL and CDMA network of Reliance Communications were worse off in May compared with the previous month.

The COAI also claimed that measurement method used by the Trai's drive test agency differed from the one adopted by the operators. "Members (of COAI) pointed out these anomalies to Trai and these still remain unresolved," it said.

Hemant M Joshi, partner, Deloitte Haskins & Sells LLP, said the issue needed to be resolved jointly by all stakeholders instead of them taking an "adversarial" posture.

"All stakeholder – the government, telcos and various bodies – need to work together on the root cause of the problem and resolve it instead of taking an adversarial stance. They can't solve the problem by blaming each other," he said.

Defending the telcos, Joshi said there were more than 50 reasons for call drops and all of them were not in control of the operators. He called for re-farming of spectrum to make it contiguous. According to him, fragmented spectrum was one of the reasons for dropped calls.

On the other hand, G Krishna Kumar, telecom professional from Bengaluru, said the telcos should not shirk their accountability in the matter.

"The end user is bothered only about decrease in call drops. Even if we assume that there are challenges for installing towers, the telcos should try to use signal boosters and in-building solutions to improve the situation. This will certainly help in reducing call drops," he said.

Smarting over its defeat in the legal tangle with telcos, Trai on Wednesday had also expressed that it would ask the government to give it more power to impose monetary penalties on the telcos. The telecom watchdog's decision to penalise the telecom operators by directing them to compensate their users for every call drop by Re 1 with an upper limit of three call drops per day was recently quashed by the Supreme Court.

Krishna Kumar believes some form of penalty was needed as a deterrent; "neither the government nor the subscriber is keen to make money out of the penalty".

Another telecom expert, who did not want to be named, said that before moving to penalty regime, it would be better if other means of resolving the issue were looked at.

"Before we go to that stage (where the Trai is given the power to levy penalty on errant telcos), the stakeholders need to jointly try and figure out what were the real causes of the problem," he said.