Illegal jammers,boosters at home, firms hampering mobile services: COAI

New Delhi, PTI: Telecom industry body COAI has written to the telecom department that illegal jammers and repeaters installed at educational institutes, homes and firms are deteriorating mobile networks service quality, resulting in call drops and low data speed for consumers. The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), whose members include Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea, etc, has requested the Department of Telecom (DoT) to take action against the illegal jammers and boosters and write to all states, informing them that use of such equipment is an offence under the Telecommunications Act 2023, which should be stopped immediately.

COAI Director General SP Kochhar said that there are instances wherein during the routine monitoring of the network, degradation in RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) parameter is observed. "Upon further analysis for such degradation, it surfaced that degradation of RSSI parameters is primarily due to installation of jammers by educational institutions/ schools, without obtaining necessary approval from competent authority and intallation of illegal boosters by households/companies, etc," Kochhar said.