Airtel, Jio commit to invest Rs. 74,000 crore to expand infrastructure over call drops


 

Airtel and Jio Call drops

Airtel and Jio have readily committed to investing Rs. 74,000 by next fiscal year to upgrade and expand infrastructure and address the issue of call drops said Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan post the DoT review. 

Bharti Airtel said that they have already invested Rs 16,000 crore on infrastructure and now will be spending another Rs 24,000 crore. On the other hand, the Reliance Jio are also committed to invest Rs 50,000 crore in installing 1 lakh towers in the coming fiscal year, Sundararajan said, after meeting senior officials of telecom companies.

Apart from Airtel and Jio, Idea Cellular and Vodafone are also ready in committing to increasing mobile towers in their network. Furthermore, she said that while telecom operators in India have stabilized the call drop, it is the other problems like voice fading that have increased due to various issues, like mobile phones these days not complying with required certification norms.

They have also raised the issue of illegal repeaters installed in networks which might be creating interference and affecting call quality. To which Sundararajan responded by saying “We will look into enforcing rules more stringently.” Telecoms have reportedly claimed that around 400 callers in India are using the same mobile tower during same time which is not the case with other countries like China where the average is around 200-300.

While the data usage didn’t really surprise the Telecos, it is the two-times growth in voice traffic which has increased the load on networks. On the other hand, TRAI has already requested mobile networks to submit network-related data for checking service quality under the new benchmarks.

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