Vodafone to resolve call drops on a war footing

The company has identified that 490 sites are required to get a good network.

Vodafone India, facing flak over frequent call drops on its network, has invested Rs 500 crore in the first eight months of the current financial year to improve its services in Delhi and the national capital region but expressed reservations on the order to compensate users for dropped calls.

The company’s Managing Director and CEO, Sunil Sood, said they were working on a war footing to improve services.

“We have actually set up a war room in Delhi…We extended our budget; between April and end of November we have invested above Rs. 500 crore to modernise our networks and there has been a significant improvement,” he said.

Asked if the company will take a legal recourse on telecom regulator’s order mandating that telecom companies to compensate users for dropped calls, Mr Sood said: “We would like to have a dialogue with the government over compensation plans. All stakeholders need to work together to fix problem rather that look at things like compensation. Nowhere in the world do we have such rules.”

According to a survey by Telecom Enforcement, Resource and Monitoring (TERM) cell which operates under the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) call drop on Vodafone’s network in Delhi was in the range of 0.3-2.97 in October, an improvement from 1.53-6.63 in August. Telecom regulator TRAI has set a benchmark of 2 per cent.

“The improvement is also due to the addition of new cell sites (geographical location). We had identified that 490 sites are required to get a good network. In the last month we added record number of 160 cites. We are working towards putting up at least 2-3 sites a month,” Mr Sood said.

The company has over 6,000 cell sites in Delhi NCR.

Mr. Sood said the company has brought in additional 50 technical experts from their other circles to expedite network optimisation process. It has also hired other third-party network optimisation teams.

Vodafone India, which is the country’s second largest telecom operator, will also be launching 4G services in five circles, including Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Karnataka and Kerala before the end of March 2016.