Something just happened today. Something that has left the government scrambling to blame someone, and clearly, there’s just the operators to blame.

That something, may have been the Prime Ministers call getting dropped, but we can assure you that its the least of his problems on the bumpy road to a Digital India.

Similar to the low bandwidth problem that India faces as a major roadblock to success (it did try to block porn to solve the problem), there is a similar issue that exists with choked up cellular networks. One that leads to headaches and the two common words on every mobile subscriber’s mouth, call drops.

What are call drops?

A call drop, or a dropped call, can take place due to a multiplicity of reasons. But the most common reason is the lack of cell towers or the congested ones, those blazing sources of EMR (Electromagnetic Radiation) atop many buildings in crowded cities.

So if you are travelling from point A to point B in a metropolitan area, your smartphone is busy jumping cell towers to keep your conversations connected.

But at a given point between those places will lie an area with a congested network.

Your smartphone is unable to hook on to towers that will accept your current call in progress, simply because they are already loaded to the brim with other calls.

The worked up towers reject your call, and if your smartphone is unable to latch on to another one in a millisecond, well you have a classic case of a dropped call.

But that is the Government’s side of the story.

Spectrum (or the lack of it)

Spectrum is another important reason for dropped calls. Its the medium of airwaves that operators are allowed to buy and use for limited periods of time to deliver voice and data facilities with 2G, 3G and now 4G networks.

Did you know, that the Government of India assigns more spectrum to defence than to any anything else?

Basically, all those billions of dollars in auctions that the government earns every year, is just for a few bands, in a range that spans from 900 MHz to 3000 MHz.

The lower the frequency, the faster the delivery and the longer the distance. What this means is that operators will need to use fewer towers over long distances with the 900 MHz spectrum.

But it is not exactly a rosy scenario for operators either.

Those lower bands mean better services to customers and with fewer towers, which is why they are the most sought after spectrum with the highest prices. Bands higher up the chart require more costs to set up more cell towers. And those lower bands again begin to choke up networks, when you keep adding more subscribers to your base.

The future

Clearly, there needs to be some regulation out here. Operators blame the government for the lack of interest in giving them solutions to set up towers, and the government blames the operators for not setting up enough towers with updated hardware.

Either ways its the consumer who is trapped with the dropped calls. And yes, operators do benefit from them as well since most of them bill subscribers by the second.

Someone needs to keep a check on the number of towers needed to cater to a set subscriber base. And according to many associations, India falls short by a more than 1,00,000 towers, with about 5,00,000 currently installed which is also less for subscriber base that goes into billions. Well, blame it on the growing number of subscribers then.

The solution lies in the government freeing up more spectrum for use in PM’s Digital India campaign. More spectrum will lead to lesser congestion on networks and fewer dropped calls.

But looking at the sad blame game, it clearly appears that our government has not matured just yet.

[Also Read: Everyone's Buying A 4G Smartphone To Use It On A 3G-Like Network]

Tags : Call Drops, mobile operators