India’s dropped calls conundrum

Thanks to the sustained effort from the various television news channels and the print media, highlighting the issue of phone call drops plaguing the country, and there by get the stakeholders to act.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) had instructed the telcos to provide a solution for the call drops within 15 days. The time frame is quite ambitious, but subscribers seem happy about the sudden seriousness the issue has found.

In fact, the situation is quite intriguing as the government and telcos are blaming each other for the crisis.

Earlier this week, India’s largest telecom service provider by revenues, Airtel, has announced that all the pre-paid subscribers will be moved from per-minute billing to a per-second billing. This means subscribers just pay for the seconds they have actually consumed.

For example, in the case of per-minute billing, if a person talks for 35 seconds and then the call drops, he/she will be charged for the entire minute, while the person will only be charged for 35 seconds in the per-second billing.

Good move, but why not include post-paid subscribers as well, who give over four times the average revenue per user (ARPU) compared to pre-paid subscribers?

In any case, Airtel’s move is aimed at silencing the critics who argue that the telcos create call drops and earn 10-40 per cent additional revenues thanks to the per-minute billing.

Acquiring and retaining customers is a huge challenge in any business and, in this backdrop, it is hard to believe any telco would purposely ‘engineer’ call-drops, annoy its subscribers and try to increase revenues.

Subscribers can easily switch to any other telecom service provider through the simple and inexpensive network portability process. However, as the quality of service with most telcos being similar, and with lack of differentiation, customers stay with the incumbent service provider.

The dropped call rate (DCR) is an important measure for voice calls and anyone who has travelled abroad would know that the calls drop even there, but rarely.

For example, in the US and Europe dropped call rate is less than 1 per cent of total calls. In fact, some of the telcos in Europe are aiming at getting the DCR close to zero.

Although the benchmark set by TRAI is <2 per cent, recent audit reports reveal that the call drop rate was an average of 12 per cent to 17 per cent in the country.

The call drop issue may have suddenly gained prominence, but subscribers have been experiencing the problem for many years and it has been taken for granted by most of them.

Why did this happen? One of the reasons is that TRAI’s reporting on call drops have been irregular and incorrect. It is difficult to believe that the DCR was much better than benchmark, say, one or two years ago.

Thankfully, TRAI has realised the magnitude of the issue and one hopes the regulator would publish DCR every fortnight till we see some improvement.

We also need more granular data about call drops or other quality-of-service parameters per operator and per location. For example, it will be interesting to see who is the best telco in Mysore or Nagpur, rather than data at circle level.

Can we expect the call drops issue to be completely fixed in a couple weeks? That’s quite unlikely, but some action from telcos in fine tuning the infrastructure would help. More importantly, if the towers that were shut down are restarted, they can provide some relief.

Adding towers will certainly help and may be the government should audit and assure the residents that the radiation effects are well under limits and publish quarterly results.

Lack of signal coverage resulting in call drops inside large concrete buildings such as apartments or office parks can be addressed by in-building solutions. Basically, there are efficient plug-and-play signal enhancers that the telcos could deploy for reducing dropped call rates.

Lack of spectrum is a constant complaint from the telcos. Indian telcos own roughly 1/5th of the spectrum compared to their peers in other countries. Also, a recent report states that in India, there is only 0.1 MHz of spectrum available for one million subscribers, compared to 3-6 MHz in Europe.

Indian telcos are stretching their infrastructure, shows another report. In metros, Indian telcos handle 8 times more voice calls per MHz per tower and 15 times more data per MHz per tower.

The mobile data consumption per month in India is just 1/10th that of the US and other advanced countries. We will soon see hyper growth in data consumption, and lack of spectrum will become a challenge then.

Specifics on spectrum sharing and trading are expected to be announced shortly. This can certainly help in bringing the call drops down.

India’s mobile telecom market is highly fragmented with 10-12 telcos operating in each circle, compared to the global average of 3-5 telcos. Consolidation in the industry could be the next big wave for improving efficiencies and it is imperative that the government announces a mergers and acquisition policy soon.

Another tricky topic is on the regulatory fees. The fees in India is nearly 20 per cent of the revenues earned by the telcos, compared to 3-4 per cent in China and other countries.

Shouldn’t there be a revisit on this and at the same time push the telcos hard to meet the prescribed quality of service.

We may not see close to zero dropped call rate in India, but some sustained actions from the telcos, TRAI and the government can certainly help in improving the situation.

The writer is a Bengaluru-based ICT professional. The views are personal