Less funding cause of call drops: Govt

Terming the lack of investment by telecom firms on networks as a reason for call drops, the Centre on Tuesday said mobile telecom companies cannot escape the responsibility of meeting standards as it is their basic service obligation.

Rejecting the operators’ reasons, such as shutting down of towers and radiation fears for call drops, Telecom Secretary Rakesh Garg said all these factors existed earlier too but the problem has worsened in the last seven months.

He said if expenditure on spectrum is set aside, operators have invested only about 13 per cent of their revenue into infrastructure. Telecom operators, on Monday, met the Department of Telecom secretary over the call drops issue and demanded a nation-wide mobile tower policy as well as easing restriction on erection of sites for improving quality of telephone services.

“They cannot escape from the investment in the current technology (2G), which are being used by the public so they need to pay attention to this,” Garg said.

The secretary said operators need to optimise their networks for handling voice and data traffic. He said what is happening currently is that telcos have allocated more bandwidth to data as compared to voice.

The operators blamed lack of towers for call drops and demanded a uniform national tower policy that can be implemented across the country. They claimed that in 2014-15 alone, the industry committed Rs 1,34,000 crore towards development of networks.