Telecom industry bodies have written to Delhi’s Lt Governor Najeeb Jung to initiate public awareness programmes, in order to allay the misconceptions pertaining to mobile towers, which in turn will help the service providers to lay more to provide better service.

“For providing seamless connectivity without any gaps, it is required to have a continuous mesh of cell sites in the mobile network architecture. Mobile towers are the most important and essential element of the mobile network and in the absence of these there is bound to be gaps in the mobile signal coverage,” the industry bodies said in the letter available with IANS.

The industry bodies, signatory to the letter were the Cellular Operators’ Association of India, Association of Unified Telecom Service Providers of India and Tower and Infrastructure Providers Association.

The industry bodies said the envisaged “Digital India”, “Smart Cities” and “inclusive growth” objectives of the present government can be achievable only with a robust and scalable mobile network.

“State governments and local authorities have not been able to devise bylaws and state-specific guidelines which could address the concerns with respect to non-adequate telecom network coverage in the states.

“In fact, numerous complaints regarding call-drops, non-completion of calls, poor audio quality and other quality of service issues have been reported by customers. The industry, on multiple occasions have highlighted to the authorities the need to have uniform guidelines across all the states for provide permission for installing more mobile towers and Right of Way (RoW) to lay additional optical fibre cable (OFC),” the letter said.

The letter mentioned: “Further, the DoT (Department of Telecom) guidelines dated Aug 1, 2013 issued to the state governments, regarding issuance of clearance for installation of mobile towers, clearly defines important actions to be taken by the DoT/TERM cells and the state governments/local bodies as follows.”

IANS