Department of Telecommunications (DoT) Secretary Rakesh Garg wants Indian telecoms to adopt the following investment strategies to improve quality of services (QoS).
# deployment of additional sites to ensure optimum coverage
# use of geo-spatial tool for micro-analyzing time-spatial performance
# real time network optimization and load balancing
# deployment of separate Network quality enhancement team
# installation of low power small cells to address coverage holes
# use of in-building solutions for indoor coverage
# more investment in network up-gradation for ensuring QoS
Rakesh Garg wants Indian telecoms such as Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular, Vodafone, Tata Docomo, Reliance Communications, etc. to invest more in telecom infrastructure.
Telecom secretary is unhappy when Indian telecom CEOs said they invested Rs 24,000 crore or $4 billion towards telecom equipments in 2014. For comparison, AT&T, a telecom operator in the U.S., invested nearly $18 billion towards Capex last year.
Indian telecoms said they have made investment of Rs 134,000 crore. Rs 24,000 crore was for capital equipment with a Capex to revenue ratio of 73 percent against global coverage of 12-18 percent. DoT Secretary said Rs 110,000 crore was towards the spectrum acquired through auction alone. This means, Indian telecoms spend around 13 percent of their revenue on telecom infrastructure Capex. He feels that they need to spend more.
Indian telecom CEOs said call drop is a worldwide phenomenon whenever transformation from 2G to 3G/4G takes place. DoT wants telecoms to optimally allocate the resources for various services in all the frequency bands i.e. 800 MHz/900 MHz/1800 MHz/2100 MHz/2300 MHz.
DoT Secretary says that the shortage of towers due to non-cooperation of State Government and local bodies can’t be accepted as a reason for the call drops in the last 4-6 months as this problem has assumed severe proportion during this period. There is an immediate requirement of rigorous optimization exercise to be taken up by all service providers.
Baburajan K
editor@telecomlead.com
