Trai Chairman to Meet Telecom Operator CEOs on Call Drop Issue

Apart from call drops, other issues concerning the industry will also be discussed at the meeting. Industry hotshots including Gopal Vittal of Bharti Airtel, Sunil Sood of Vodafone, Gurdeep Singh of Reliance Communications and Himanshu Kapania of Idea Cellular, among others, will hold discussions with Trai Chairman RS Sharma.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has proposed that service providers should compensate mobile subscribers for call drops and poor quality of services.

The regulator said it is also considering making it mandatory for telecom operators to disclose their network capacities periodically as the regulator feels that the call drop problem needs to be examined in entirety.

Analysing the issue of call drops, Trai said operators can reduce them to a large extent by way of improving radio coverage, expanding the capacity of the network and optimising the performance of various network elements, which require both efforts and investments on their part.

The industry though is of the view that call drops are not on account of overall capacity constraint but operators' ability to either deploy sites in key and critical areas or shortage of spectrum.

A recent Trai report found that most of the telecom operators in Delhi and Mumbai were not meeting the prescribed standards regarding call drops.