A DoT study shows that the call drop situation has improved in Delhi

The Call drop situation in Delhi has improved but telecom operators are still beyond the quality benchmark set for mobile telephony services, Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said today.

"Call drops situation has improved between July-October period. I am happy with the improvement but telecom operators still need to work to make their network better," Prasad told reporters.

The minister shared the data based on a survey by the TERM cell, the vigilance and resource monitoring arm of the Department of Telecom. The data showed that call drop situation on mobile networks has improved but the operators are still beyond the quality parameters set for call drops.

As per the benchmark, not more than 2% of the calls made on a telecom operator's network should fail or disconnect automatically due to network-related faults.

Call drops on the network of the country's largest operator Bharti Airtel improved from the range of 2.92 - 17.77 in August to 0.08-2.98 at the end of October, as per tests conducted by the TERM cell in Delhi on various roots. Call drops on Idea's network improved from 3.34-10.9 to 0.14-2.65, Vodafone 1.53-6.63 to 0.3-2.97, Reliance Communications went from 1.53-24.83 to 0.02-5.15, and Aircel went from 0.77-6.21 to 0.29-2.66 during the period under review.

Prasad said that situation has improved because of additional installation of mobile towers, repairing of non-functional cell sites and improvement in network design.

"Earlier about 35,000 cell sites were found to be defective. In the last 25,598 were found to be defective. Out of which 13,775 have been repaired and 13,823 are pending," Prasad said. There are total 18.33 lakh mobile sites in India installed by telecom operators.

Yesterday, the TRAI report said the performance of operators deteriorated during the April-June quarter on sequential basis with regard to worst-affected mobile sites or cells having more than 3% call drop rate.

The report on the operators' performance said that mobile operators had a call drop rate of as high as 24.59% for 2G services and 16.13% for 3G services in the April-June quarter of 2015.