Customers are complaining about dropped calls and bad network connectivity after India’s South Corp. shut down 100 illegal towers across south New Delhi over the past month.
“The network issue has been there for the past few months, but call drops have become very frequent in the past few weeks,” said Vivek Singh, a resident of Lajpat Nagar.
The drive to seal the unauthorized towers came after telecom companies refused to pay installation charges levied by South Corp.
“The building department conducts a survey and identifies the towers installed without any permission. If the telecom company agrees to pay the installation charge to the corporation and the locality is deemed suitable for a cell tower, the department approves them,” said a senior official of the central zone.
Officials were sympathetic to the continuous call drops that residents were feeling, but claim they are helpless to fix it.
“All these towers are unauthorized. These were installed without seeking any approval from the corporation,” said a senior official of the west zone. “We are also facing the same problems.”
Of the four zones affected by the sealing of the towers, 25 are in the central zone with more than 10 notices also being issued. In the west zone, 28 towers have been affected, with 32 being affected in the Najafgarh zone. The south zone so far stands at 15.
The towers had all been activated after Jan. 1, 2014, according to The Times of India. The official who spoke on the issue added they now plan to start cracking down on unauthorized towers activated after 2014.
This is not the first time India has cracked down on illegal towers. In 2013, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation set out to define guidelines to identify illegal telecommunication infrastructure in the city of Hyderabad.
The new rules included guidelines for basic safety measures and structural stability not previously defined. At the time, officials estimated there were around 7,500 cell towers in the city in the form of anything from ground-based towers, rooftop towers, rooftop poles and cellphone towers to antenna fixtures and fabricated antennas, The Times of India reported.
Shortly after the guidelines were handed down, the GHMC began collecting fees from cell tower operators who were required to pay for their towers under the new rules.
