Call Drops: Telecom Minister to Conduct Drive Test in Delhi

"I, (JS) Deepak and Anupam (Shrivastava) will go around in Delhi to monitor call drops," Prasad said Thursday at a BSNL event where he launched modern telephone service of the state-run telecom firm.

The minister said that if he is taking initiative to work on ground, he would even like top BSNL officials to come out of their office and work on the ground level.

Prasad had earlier conducted drive tests in Indore with the Chairman and Managing Director of BSNL.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) conducted a drive test of call drops in December-January period and found most of the telecom operators, including state-run MTNL, failed random drive tests conducted by the regulator Trai to check quality of their network and services as part of its efforts to rein in call drop menace.

As per the Trai report, none of the telecom operators showed improvement in call drops in Mumbai, Pune and Bhubaneswar.

In Indore, the telecom regulator found 2G network of Airtel, Vodafone, RCom CDMA and Tata CDMA complied with the call drop norms while other failed.

Prasad has set a target for BSNL to achieve 1 crore customer base in financial year 2016-17.

"In around April, BSNL was selling 7-8 lakh sim (cards) and in January- March, BSNL started selling 20 lakh sim. I am told BSNL has 70 lakh customers. I would like to see this customer base to grow 1 crore net in 2016-17. I am even ready to sit and sell sims for BSNL," Prasad said.

He said that BSNL needs to communicate to masses about its services and work which it has not been doing.

"If BSNL can market its product with right strategy, I am sure we will see same kind of revolution in landline segment as we have seen in mobile telephony," he said.

The minister said that many people are not aware of free nation-wide night calling service being offered by BSNL as the company has not been able to communicate well to masses.

Telecom Secretary JS Deepak said that BSNL is utilising only 70 percent of its network capacity compared to 90 percent level utilised by private telecom operators.