Day after the drive test results on call drops were out in the public domain by telecom regulator Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), showing worsening call drop situation, mobile operators on Thursday hit back the regulator, saying that the issue is limited to area where the problems of installing towers are still existing.
“While the area of Delhi NCR is 46,208 kilometer square, these results are limited to a route covering 600 km only. Hence the quality of services (QoS) results from the Drive Test are not strictly comparable with the standard QoS for Dropped Calls regularly published by TRAI for the entire service area,” GSM body Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) said in a statement.
“The COAI represents telecom majors, including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular, Aircel etc. The drive test and its results do not cover all the cell sites but only a limited amount of the telecom circle,” it added.
The regulator published its report on drive tests of mobile service quality on Wednesday and found that all 3G networks; 2G networks of Airtel and MTNl and CDMA network of RCom have shown degradation in performance compared to previous drive test.
In the latest tests conducted in Delhi, State-run telecom operator MTNl failed on all network-based quality of service parameters. However, COAI has contested the same and said, “When we look at the QoS for the whole lSA of Delhi we notice that all the operators are in compliance with the benchmark set by TRAI of 2 per cent. Given the limited coverage of these Drive Tests, the results show problems limited to the known problematic areas where the industry faces issues in obtaining cell sites.”
The industry body also called report on using radio link time out technology being used for masking dropped call as misleading but did not contest finding of the TRAI report that telecom operator Aircel is using it beyond the levels being used by its peers. “It is also interesting to note that the big headlines regarding masking of call drops using the Radio link Timeout (RlT) parameter proved misleading as TRAI’s own published results in the Drive Tests show only one operator out of parameter,” COAI said.