At a time when telcos are aggressively rolling out 5G, users’ experience of the network is falling short of expectations with regards to the quality as one in two subscribers is currently facing call drop and connection issues. The issue of poor quality of services is only restricted to rural areas and small towns but people from big cities and metros, including Delhi and Mumbai, also reported issues.
A survey by LocalCircles, a community social media platform, shows that half of the 11,000 5G subscribers surveyed said that they faced call connection and call drop issues for over 25% of their calls, whereas 28% of users have been facing these service quality issues for over 50% of their calls.
“The need of the hour here is for operators to root-cause what is driving the poor consumer experience with 5G so far and also create awareness amongst prospect users about what to expect,” the survey said, adding that when 5G was launched in October, 58% mobile subscribers had indicated that they expected improvement on the call connection and drop front while 51% were expecting improvement in data speeds post migrating to 5G.
Also read: OnePlus 11 5G tipped to launch globally with slower 80W fast charging: Everything we know so far
The survey covered over 34,000 respondents across 185 districts of the country focussing on different aspects of quality of services such as data connectivity, call drops and connection, and user experience of 5G in comparison with 3G/4G.
Apart from the call quality issues, 49% of the 11,449 subscribers said that their data speeds have improved in 5G compared to 3G or 4G networks. “While the user input is a bit more encouraging on the data speed or connection front than on call connection/drop experience, only 49% 5G subscribers confirming that speed is better with 5G is a cause of concern that the government and operators must immediately look into,” the report said.
Currently, 5G services are available in over 150 cities, and owing to the lack of 5G base transceiver stations (BTS) across the cities, users are not seeing much improvement in telecom services compared to 4G, according to experts.
Last month, the department of telecommunications had a meeting with the operators to get a sense of the quality of services. In the meeting, DoT officials asked the companies to improve their quality of services benchmark and even extended any government support required with regard to policy tweaks, etc, in improving the service quality.
Also read: Apple to roll out iOS 16.3 update with iPhone 14 Pro display yellow line fix next week
The telecom operators had cited factors such as poor quality of handsets, use of illegal boosters and jammers, right of way (RoW)-related permissions, among others, affecting the user experience with regards to call drops and data services.
In September last year, communications minister Ashwini Vaishnaw had asked telecom regulator Trai to increase the quality of services parameters by 3-4 times. “Whatever is the quality of service we are seeing today, it should improve significantly,” Vaishnaw had said.
