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Taking a cue from the ever increasing network congestion issues and more specifically its impact during emergencies like bomb blasts or natural calamities, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India(TRAI) has invited suggestions from the industry stakeholders to come up with solutions that can offer uninterrupted telecom services for the people engaged in response and recovery work.
The regulator has floated a pre consultation paper on this regard.
The regulator has said that during the Mumbai bomb blast on July 13 this year, the problem of congestion in the cellular mobile network of the city was reported and further course of action was affected.
In order to facilitate a mechanism in which important functionaries engaged in response and recovery work during emergencies get the calls on priority, the regulator is planning to come up with a consultation paper on priority call routing.
The authority is looking for consultations from the stakeholders, focussing primarily on the network congestion issues.
The regulator has noted two main elements of communication failure during crisis which includes loss of infrastructure, resulting in damaging of communication eqipments during the disaster and overload/network congestion which occurs when usage peaks to a level where systems are unable to cope.
The authority has received responses from various telecom service providers reflecting that the call attempts of various operators increased 2-4 times and the Call Completion Ratio(CCR) dropped because of increased call attempts during a crisis.The drop in CCR occurred more in Point Of Interconnections(POIs).
TRAI as of now suggests dimensioning of equipment, which involves dimensioning of core network and Point Of Interconnection(POI) for enhancing the capacity of the network to handle increased volume of traffic.
While the other solution according to the operator is providing priority to the certain users so that in case of emergency calls from them get priority on the network.