Tarana asks telcos to compensate for call drops

State Minister for Telecommuni-cation Tarana Halim yesterday gave two months time to the mobile phone operators to improve their services quality and bring call drops to a minimum.

In a meeting at her office, she directed all six operators to compensate their subscribers for call drops and the poor network

quality.

"Every subscriber is equally important and we need to give the highest level of importance to protect their rights," said the state minister.

"Operators must submit a proposal, describing how they want to compensate if any subscriber suffers. It can be money, voice minutes or data," she said in the meeting with the chief executives of the mobile operators. 

Operators in India compensate for call drops and the same thing should be introduced here, she added.

Tarana said Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission was also asked to submit a proposal on how to ensure operators' services quality.

A BTRC study in 15 districts has found that 78 percent mobile users face call drops, said Md Emdad ul Bari, director general of BTRC. The study has not been published yet. According to International Telecommunication Union, 3 percent of call drops are permissible.

Several components of the service chain can lead to call drops, telecom officials said.

 "We must take fibre connectivity from other operators, and sometimes they fail to serve in time. Calls are also terminated from different operators, so everybody is responsible for it," said Mahmud Hossain, chief corporate affairs officer of Grameenphone.

"Crores of call minutes come from different countries even, and the quality of calls may not be up to the mark there either. But the end users blame us," he added.

As they cannot establish their own fibre connections, they depend on microwave connections, the performance of which can be affected by the weather, Robi officials said.

Rajeev Sethi, CEO of Grameenphone, said call drops cannot be brought to a zero under mobile communication.

PD Sharma, CEO of Airtel, said they have already introduced one second pulse, and if the operators adopt it, customers will not be overcharged.

Tarana also said she would sit with the NTTN operators, international exchange operators and international gateway operators as the mobile companies have raised concern about their network infrastructure.

She said operators cannot run any service without subscribers' consent, and auto-renewal of any component of mobile services will not be tolerated.

Tarana also asked BTRC to send the value-added services guidelines to the ministry so that the government can pass it quickly.