There has been virtually no decrease in call drops and improvement in the quality of mobile network coverage in recent months despite the government’s tough posture on the issue, a service quality audit by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has revealed.
While telecom firms give performance monitoring reports to TRAI every quarter, the telecom regulator has been auditing and assessing their Quality of Service through independent agencies to verify their claims since June 2015 in view of complaints about call drops and other network issues.
The audit agencies conduct sample “drive tests” across various cities in the country to assess coverage quality.
While the last two audits tested only 2G networks, 3G networks were also tested in this audit conducted in December 2015 and January 2016 in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Pune, Bhubaneswar, Surat and Indore.
The capital was the only region to see some decrease in call drops between September 2015 and January, but in most other cities, not a single telecom player met the TRAI standard of less than 2 per cent calls dropping after connecting.
In Kolkata, only CDMA telecom carriers were able to meet the benchmark.
Network coverage improved a bit in New Delhi and Mumbai, but saw no improvements in Kolkata and other cities.
However, no telecom firm met the standards for quality of reception and voice services in New Delhi and Bhubaneswar, while voice quality has got worse in Pune.
In Mumbai, only CDMA telecom firms met the TRAI’s quality benchmark.
The ability to set up a call successfully and the rate of blocked calls have improved in the case of some players in the capital and most telecom firms in Kolkata.
Most telecom firms have raised doubts about TRAI’s findings and sought the complete audit data trail from the regulator.
On the audit findings in Mumbai, Vodafone said there was a large variance between the summary results in “your reports vis-à-vis our own experience and information on performance of our networks”.
“The drive test reports shared by you should not be published,” Vodafone representative Manish Gupta wrote to the regulator asking for details of the audit methodology.
Idea, which operates in five of the seven cities audited, said, “the results are way different from the last tim’ so it is very difficult to make any specific comments without access to the raw data on which the findings are based”.
