Few thousands of people travel on any Mumbai local train. These trains run with a period of every 5-10 minutes. This means, you have thousands of people present anywhere on track and at any point of time. Many of them belong to organized sector. Each person would spend at least an hour or two on an average (to and from). In any case, all the commuters represent a good economy for consuming various services on move.
It is clear to see that during local journeys people prefer Mobile VAS services in order to pass their time. Forget the quality of network in accessing data services on move, even when one wants to make calls or receive calls (from train commuters), Â call drop is very high and voice break is very much persistent. I could never find the reason why telecom operators don’t install sufficient towers on pathways of train track routes/ bus routes/traffic signals.
 I strongly believe, any directions in this regard would lead to increase in usage of Mobile VAS. What do you think?
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I am aware of these tests which are performed in order to find the quality of service. 3 years ago, I used to work at ControlCase and our office is located on Andheri-Kurla Road, very very close to Airport. These days, most of the new offices of IT/banking/KPO companies are located here. And so, this place forms a prime location for all of the operator.
At that time, I used HUTCH (now Vodafone) number, and to make a single call (during 9AM – 9PM), one has to press 20 times due to “network congestion”. Here call-drop and/or voice crack is very high.
Then I tried to follow HUTCH for 2 years making complaints again and again (email, customer-care, appellant authorities etc). Few times OUTSOURCED engineers used to visit my office, I assisted them to check the issue. Engineer have always found that the problem is very much persistent. Many times I followed those engineers personally during their tests and so I am aware of these tests.
Guess what, even today the problem is same. No additional tower is established (a promise which is not fulfilled for the last 3 years).
Now I live close to Andheri-MIDC (one of the hottest business destination in Mumbai), here the network congestion issues are same with all the operators. Now I have an efficient solution for this problem. Yes, it is the multiplicity of the numbers. I am using Airtel, BPL, Reliance, MTNL numbers at my home instead of complaining (I must mention here that MTNL and reliance are relatively better among them).
After having a very good experience with these network issues, I must say, the reasons for this negligence are plenty.
1. They don’t get the permissions for cell-sites.
2. Outsourced engineers are really not cared about the consumer issues
3. Exceptional growth in mobile users
4. Trai is a regulating body however, there is no central mechanism to make complaints.
5. Operators focus is mostly on user acquisitions rather than on fundamentals such as infrastructure upgradition.
6. Currently users are sensitive about pricing of the services. Not many bothered about service quality issues. Moreover India has very less educated people to understand a technical problem. And moreover no one wishes to follow up with the courts.
So I think, as the new operators get onto battle-field and when the price variance is settled then the service quality would be considered.
Till then, this would hurt Mobile VAS players very very badly.
Thanks,
Raja
Mobile operators routinely perform what is called “drive tests” to assess the quality of their network both for their own internal use as well as for benchmarking with other operators. In these tests, special equipment is loaded in a vehicle that drives a given route and the data is analyzed and corrections made to the network if necessary. Such tests are also performed using methods that do not require driving. Every mobile company defines their quality metric for a given area of coverage. In fact, this is also mandated by TRAI. So if there is a severe coverage/quality problem on Mumbai rails, it is either because they have not considered this to be a prime area to cover or there are technical challenges. I find both highly unlikely, as any operator will not ignore such a captive user base. Still, if you are experiencing problems, the issue can and should be taken up with the various operators.