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Fed up with your poor mobile network? Be ready forever [DNA : Daily News & Analysis (India)](DNA : Daily News & Analysis (India) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) How many times you find that talking on a mobile phone (irrespective of service provider) is a frustrating mix of terrible sound quality and poor network coverage even though you have a 'smart phone' with 4G option If you have lost the count, here is a shocker. The scene would remain same forever as all the mobile operators in the country have been given "freehand" to provide whatever quality they want to deliver to crores of customers. Telecom regulatory authority of India, the apex body of telecom and mobile services in the country, which is supposed to support consumers in this case subscribers, actually has no mechanism to track audio quality or infrastructure of mobile operators, reveals an RTI query. Poor voice quality of inbound and outbound calls happens due to poor infrastructure/ lack of adequate cell towers but instead of enforcing or ensuring quality service, TRAI only "requests" the providers to maintain quality which is obviously not followed by all operators including state owned MTNL and BSNL. Rajan Srivastava (35) a telecom engineer in an MNC, who sought the information from TRAI under Right to Information Act 2005, says, "I face poor voice quality every day when I am at my third floor home. This affects my work as I have to coordinate with officials sitting abroad. I failed to get a satisfactory response from my mobile operator about poor audio quality so I decided to know TRAI's perspective but response came as a shocker as regulator washed off its hand." Srivastava asked four specific questions from TRAI: a) What are TRAI's acceptable methods that can conclude that the root-cause for the bad audio quality is the service provider's poor infrastructure in the area b) How can a customer prove that audio quality of calls is poor c) What compensations are provisioned to the subscribers that faced above kind of problem For all three questions TRIA replied: "No information available." In the response of question-Is GSM service provider responsible to track audio-quality problems of provider's network TRAI replied-The service provider is 'requested' to monitor the performance against the quality of service parameter connections with quality. Srivastava says, "Mobile operators are just making money from crores of Indians without any system in place which can ensure quality service." A top MTNL official said, "While on move, mobile receives data from more than one BTS (base transceiver station or cell tower). Handover of information from one BTS to other may not be seamless and results in voice breakage. Also, if you are on ground to 4-5 floors, signal may be poor. In city like Mumbai, big residential complexes also play obstacle in proper receiving of audio data. To overcome this, operators need to provide in-building solutions in big societies and commercial complexes but that hardly happens. Besides, few private operators don't have adequate BTS." Airtel and Reliance Communications spokesperson bought a day's time to comment citing this to be a technical matter. A Tata Teleservices official claimed, "Voice quality depends on handset. If you are using a higher version you will get a good voice. Besides, to provide good services to our big customer range, we do install in-building systems in commercial centres." However, he couldn't provide number of such systems installed in Mumbai. [email protected] Credit:Kanchan Srivastava (c) 2012 @ 2012 DILIGENT MEDIA CORPORATION LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED |