Over the last few years, call drops have bothered the cell phone users but not the operators, the government or the regulator Trai. Finally, it took a statement from the prime minister to awaken these stake holders. Hopefully, Trai will force service providers to set right the nagging issue.
You, me and even Prime Minister Narendra Modi are annoyed by the dropped calls. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), which is responsible for ensuring quality of service, is contemplating action - even penalties- against telecom operators. Will this help? No, not unless the underlying issues are addressed.
What exactly are dropped calls? They are telephone connections that break prematurely, that is, before caller or called party actually hang up. They are more common in mobile networks. Calls often drop when a user moves out of the range of a tower and the nearest alternative is too far.
Sometimes, an operator’s network may not offer 100 per cent coverage. Occasionally, the wireless signals from or to a tower might encounter a physical barrier like a hill or a large concrete structure. It’s also possible that a mobile handset has a faulty antenna.
Telecom operators are required, by regulation, to ensure that dropped calls do not exceed 2 per cent of the total. The Trai’s recent consultation paper on the subject suggests that they often fail. A preliminary survey in Delhi shows that only one operator meets the prescribed criteria and another one has call drops exceeding 17 per cent. However, it is difficult to accurately estimate the proportion of dropped calls in India since the Trai does not reveal the market share of the outlying telecom companies.
The government and the Trai suggest that the mobile operators are primarily to blame for the call drop menace. Operators, they allege, have not invested in their networks and expanded the infrastructure to keep pace with increasing usage of voice as well as data services. They suggest that the operators are prioritising data over voice services and that the operators stand to gain from dropped calls since a customer often ends up making more calls than necessary.
The government and the Trai might be oversimplifying matters. The allegations go somewhat counter to market realities. The proportion of revenues from voice in India is among the highest in the world - over 80 per cent of the total. It is difficult to imagine companies risking them so callously when it costs Rs 19 to change an operator. No city in the world offers a greater choice of competing mobile operators.
Would it be so difficult for one or two companies to grab market share by stepping up investment? Clearly, the incentives and commercial imperatives cannot all be the same for different operators, old and new players, GSM and CDMA players, private and public players, country’s largest business houses and smaller players.
We cannot explain away a countrywide problem in such a competitive market in such trite terms. At the same time, we need an explanation that applies to the wide cross section of wireless industry players.
Mobile operators say they face barriers to expand capacity and improve quality of service such as acute shortage of spectrum, a finite resource vital for wireless networks. They argue that they support more users on their network than their international counterparts who often work with several times more spectrum. In India, the government has released less spectrum, there are many more operators and much of spectrum, especially 1800 MHz, is badly fragmented and therefore unusable.
This and the government’s auction design ensured around 11 per cent of the spectrum found no buyers last time. They claim the government has exploited the scarcity of spectrum to extract higher bids in auctions. Recent auctions have also compounded the problem of call drops as many companies are yet to fully optimise their networks after changes in spectrum allocation.
Towers, too, exacerbate the challenge of call drops for telecom operators. Like spectrum, they are vital to wireless communication and must be distributed effectively to provide network coverage in a service area. However, erecting towers is rarely easy as states, municipalities and other authorities have widely disparate processes, rules, fees and time to approve towers. Corruption and delays are rampant and many authorities often shutdown towers with little or no notice.
Service quality
Several resident welfare associations (RWAs) and individuals, driven by fears about mobile radiation, not only oppose new towers but also want existing ones removed. The assurances by the government, industry and many experts that the levels of radiation are safe and that India’s safety norms are stricter than other countries, have been ignored by those concerned about radiation from the towers.
Penalties may not work. With over 90 crore connections, it is virtually impossible to effectively monitor service quality, enforce rules or conclusively prove guilt. It is hardly surprising that Trai’s own consultation paper cursorily cites only one example – without details - of a country (Colombia) which has attempted similar measures. It will require tedious and dangerous micromanagement to force companies to invest more. The Trai’s best bet is to ensure that it shares sufficient data about call quality, in a format that can enable users to vote with their feet by selecting appropriate service providers.
Call drops reflect our poor handling of the wireless ecosystem. The problem of call drops is even more severe in India because we rely predominantly on wireless systems for phone calls and internet access. No major economy relies so overwhelmingly on wireless. The usage is spread across multiple networks, including landline, optical fibre, cable, satellite etc. In most countries, towers are connected with each other using underground fibre with virtually no challenge to capacity or reliability. In India, this is rare.
This reliance on wireless calls for different approach. It requires a review of spectrum management and a focus on efficient use of all spectrum. This is especially urgent, since spectrum is unlike any other natural resource which can be conserved for future use. Holding it back or keeping it idle makes little sense for either the government or the operators since it only deprives subscribers of its use.
The government has a responsibility to balance its need for revenue from spectrum with the larger goal of a fully connected digital India. It needs to work harder to build the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) or BharatNet, which will extend fibre coverage to all gram panchayats. It will strengthen the digital ecosystem, expand capacity, and reduce dependence on wireless technologies – and scarce spectrum- where possible.
The government and the regulator need to work more creatively to solve a problem which can become even worse. Much like traffic jams. The approach to solving call drops requires a collective effort – from the government, the players, authorities and citizens.
(The writer is director, Com First (India) Pvt Ltd, a Delhi-based consulting company specialising in telecommunications policy and regulation)