Mobile subscribers of Idea Cellular in Kerala faced disruptions while making and receiving phone calls on Sunday, the second day of the outage.
The poor quality network of Idea Cellular started affecting its mobile customers on Saturday morning. Since mobile customers of Idea Cellular could not make calls from their phones and inform customer care centers, there was major disappointment among the customers.
Idea Cellular has 1,04,43,233 mobile customers in Kerala. Idea Cellular is the largest telecom operator in Kerala, one of the Southern states.
Customers of Idea Cellular faced the music due to damage to the fiber optic link to the state, media reported. Mobile customers of Idea Cellular lost significant business opportunity of Saturday and Sunday.
Idea Cellular on Saturday announced that it would offer free local / STD calling for 100 minutes on June 3 and 4. Since Idea Cellular could not restore the network, mobile subscribers could not utilize the free 100 minutes as well.
“As an acknowledgement to the support of Idea customers we have extended free local/STD calling of 100 minutes, valid for 48 hours starting today midnight,” said Idea Cellular.
Due to the poor network quality of Idea Cellular, several customers complained to its customer service call centers.
Idea Cellular network is facing disruptions at a time when the Aditya Birla group company is going for a campaign to promote 4G services across the state.
Idea Cellular in May said its 4G LTE service cover 100 towns in the Kerala telecom circle. Idea’s 4G covers 53 percent of the total population across all 14 districts in Kerala. In 45 out these over 100 towns, Idea has also become the sole operator to provide 4G LTE services.
Some media reports suggest that subscribers of Bharti Airtel could not receive calls in some places in Kerala. Bharti Airtel, India’s #1 telecom operator, has 43,63,959 customers in Kerala, according to the latest report for April 2016 in TRAI.
The network outage shows that telecoms are not ready to repair the network and ensure better customer experience to Idea Cellular users.