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Uninor, Etisalat DB and Aircel have the most congested mobile networks, according to a report by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.
TRAI has been monitoring the level of congestion at the Point of Interconnection (POI) between various service providers on monthly basis. This parameter signifies the ease with which a customer of one network is able to communicate with a customer of another network. This also reflects as to how effective is the interconnection between two networks.
TRAI had earlier notified that operators should have less than 0.5 per cent congestion levels. This means out of 200 calls between two operators only one call should face congestion.
According to the latest report, Uninor had 96 such points where the congestion was higher than permitted levels. Etisalat DB and Aircel had 14 and 8 POIs, respectively, where the congestion level was high. Uninor blamed larger operators for not giving adequate points of interconnection.
“With 27 million subscribers, Uninor is a credible but smaller operator. There is obviously more traffic going from our network to others' than that coming in. Hence, by deliberately delaying capacity enhancement of the interconnecting pipe it is easy for disproportionately higher congestion to be created for our traffic. This is a price we pay for being serious new competition.
“This is another example of a restrictive trade practice that exploits our dependence on fair play. We can only continue our repeated efforts for getting adequate and timely interconnect capacity enhancement from the bigger operators,” the Uninor spokesperson said.
Bigger operators such as Idea Cellular, Tata Teleservices and Reliance Communications are among those whose networks that were found to be without any congestion at all. This list also includes Shyam Sistema, a CDMA player which had got licences around the same time as Uninor and Etisalat DB.
Overall, the TRAI report shows that the congestion levels have improved. The number of POIs having congestion has decreased from 153 in December 2010 to 102 in March 2011. Out of these 102 POIs are having congestion in March 2011, 39 POIs are having congestion more than 25 per cent as compared to 54 POIs in December 2010.
Most-affected circles
The most-affected circles due to POI congestion are Bihar (25 no. of congested PoIs) followed by Mumbai (13 no. of congested PoIs), West Bengal (12 POIs) UP-East (8POIs ), UP-West (11,POIs )Tamil Nadu(8,POIs ).
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