Call drops have been a major issue in India. Despite the telecom industry edging the development checkpoints at a steady pace, India still accounts about 60 percent call drops, as per a survey conducted by Department of Telecom (DoT).
DoT made a total of 26.97 lakh calls out of which only 3.56 lakh calls were converted into subscribers for this survey. Rest were either not willing to participate or were assumed to have not facing call drops issue in India. The 13 percent of the people (3.56 lakh) were then asked certain questions out of which 60 percent or 2.15 lakh reported the problem to be concentrated more when indoors.
However, the overall call drops rate has gone down. “The call drops reported by subscribers have dropped from 64 percent in December 2016 to 57 percent at the end of March 2017, a drop of nearly 7 percent in 3 months,” – the statement from DoT read.
Post this, the feedback is shared to Telecom Service Providers (TSPs) which are then given a time frame within which they have to submit the action report to DoT Task Force every 15 days.
The official statement from DoT read – “TSPs contact each subscriber, who has reported frequent call drops, through telephonic calls and SMS in English and local languages to collect further details required for Resolution of the complaint,”
The statement also mentioned that after Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS) was kickstarted, telecom operators have been extremely successful in resolving about 13,631 cases along with a recent 7,975 cases which reported of frequent call drops which were majorly due to roaming, data, MNP and mobile device.
The statement further added that about 1,406 cases were resolved through optimisation, rectifying hardware power issues via field visits during the period of March 15 – 31, 2017. To further bump up the process, telecom operators have already deployed 109 new sites serving a plan of about 987 sites in near future.
A lot of people who participated in this survey must be Reliance Jio subscribers as well who recently accused the operator ofa lot of call drops. Assuming that Reliance Jio is working on the issue after Airtel provided enough Interconnecting points to Jio, the call drop percentage should go down in the next survey.