With fast growing network of cellular phones in the country where even a hawker, vegetable vendor and rickshaw puller have a mobile phone in their hand, the menace of call drop continues. Now Prime Minister Narendra Modi has expressed concern over the call drop saying common man is affected by it. Prime Minister has asked the officials of Telecommunication Department to immediately check the rot.
It is increasingly becoming difficult to communicate on cellular phones these days. It may take a couple of attempts to get connected, when you are connected the speech is low and disturbed, if you are lucky to understand what the person at the other end is saying and vice versa, you suddenly find that the call is disconnected leaving with incomplete conversation. The message that you want to convey is lost.
The mobile phone service providers claim that only 3 or 5 out of 100 calls the call drops, that is five percent of cases of call drops while the Telecommunication Authority of India (TRAI) has accepted a margin of only 3 % of call drops. As a user I can say with my own experience that the claimof the service providers are false and bogus. Any user of mobile phone can calculate the number of drop calls in a day and the figure would be astounding 20 to 30 cases of call drop in 100 calls. And this is not the case of Delhi or Mumbai it a pan India problem. The smaller towns are worst hit with this menace.
How to fix it? There are more than 9.5 crore mobile users in the country today. The figure increases every day as more and more people are added to mobile network. And with each addition quality of service deteriorates. Major mobile service providers in the country say that some 2 lakh more mobile towers are needed to be raised across the country in order to improve quality of service and reduce the number of call drops. At present there are only 4,25000 mobile towers are working. This figure too is inflated. In reality there are less than 4 lakh mobile towers since many people who had let out their space on roof top to install mobile towers have terminated their contract following reports that electromagneti waves generated from the towers causes radition which in turn poses danger of contacting dreaded desease like cancer. A random survey would show that while stell erections are there, the antennas have been removed. Beside the point, the major service providers whose earnings run into thousands of crores of rupees pay small amount to land and house owners for using their place to erect mobile towers. The service providers say that it cost them approximately 20 lakh rupees to erect one mobile tower. Recently,the service providers informed the Standing Committee of Parliament on Telecommunications and Information Technology that the companies were burdened with bank loans that ran into more than two lakh crores of rupees. Beside that the service providers argue that they paid huge sums to the government in auction of 2G and 3G spectrum. If you believe the figure given by the industry, the companies coughed up more than 1 lakh crores of rupees in the spectrum auction that ended in March this year. May one ask the service providers a simple question? Before bidding for spectrum, the companies must have made calculations and due diligence before buying spectrum. It is not that they bid ad bought the spectrum to incur loss and gave the money to the government for some relief fund.
If are going to catch a flight or a train and need last minute information about departure time, it is more than likely that you may end up trying to contact the airline or railway station and reach the airport or station only to find that you are flight has either taken off or is delayed by hours. So will be the fate of passengers travelling by train.
This is no excuse to hold the mobile users or for that matter the country to ransom by refusing to improve services.
....R K Sinha, MP (Rajya Sabha)
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