Telcos to blame for call drops: TRAI chief

September 16, 2015 03:04 am | Updated November 17, 2021 01:46 am IST - NEW DELHI:

The regulator will notremain a silent spectator,says R.S. Sharma.

The regulator will notremain a silent spectator,says R.S. Sharma.

Dismissing arguments over the lack of mobile towers and spectrum leading to a spate of call drops in the past few months, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India Chairman R.S. Sharma said the “remedy” for the problem lies solely with the service providers.

Speaking to The Hindu , Mr. Sharma said telecom operators have “commitments towards customers and they cannot short-change them… There are no compelling reasons [for increase in call drops]. We see no reason why quality of service should deteriorate.” He pointed out that these problems may be due to capacity constraints.

“If you have more customers than you can satisfy, either you put up more infrastructure or you should not have the customers… but what is happening is that operators want to have the cake and eat it too. So you have enrolled more customers but the infra required has been ignored,” Mr. Sharma said.

He, however, stressed that the regulator will not remain a silent spectator and will take proactive steps if the situation does not improve.

On operators opposing making public their operational capacity, he said, “They have to make it public. There is no question of not making this public. It is an issue of transparency.”

While maintaining that lack of towers and spectrum deficiency cannot be used as an “alibi” for poor quality of services, he said TRAI will come out with a ‘diagnostic paper’ next week enlisting its finding on the issue and pinning down the exact reasons for call drops, initially for Delhi and Mumbai circles.

“That is not correct (lack of mobile towers). Statistics don’t really support this theory. There may problem in some areas, but its not a massive issue… one tower goes down, two more come up. It is a continuous process,” he said.

On arguments over spectrum deficiency, Mr. Sharma said, “The problem has increased in the past 5-6 months. In this time the spectrum has not shrunk suddenly. In fact, if at all, more spectrum has been made available. At the same time the customer base is growing at a steady rate.”

The regulator will also conduct an independent test drive by the end of the month to check if any improvements have been achieved by the operators during the past few weeks.

“TRAI is committed to consumer protection because in the entire ecosystem there are many stakeholders but the weakest is the consumer in terms of articulating their problems and grievances. Therefore, as a regulator we need to ensure that we are able to protect consumer interest,” Mr. Sharma said.

On the issue of net neutrality, he said: “We have issued a paper and received a huge number of responses …1.8 million in number. We are processing them.”

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