OLA TO LAUNCH OPERATIONS IN AUSTRALIA THIS YEAR

BENGALURU: Cab aggregator Ola on Tuesday said it plans to launch operations in Australia in early 2018, its first expansion into an overseas market.

In its press statement, Ola did not share details of an exact launch date but said it is inviting private vehicle owners in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth to register with its cab booking platform. The company is yet to receive regulatory approvals from Australian authorities.

The Australian cab aggregator market already has Uber, Australia-based cab-hailing company Gocatch and a new entrant named Taxify.

Gocatch has raised $11 million, while Taxify has raised $2 million till date. Ola will be one of the well-funded aggregators to enter Australia after Uber.

Ola had raised $1.1 billion in funding from Tencent and Softbank in October 2017, its largest funding round since 2015 when it raised $500 million.

Founded in 2011, Ola claims to have 125 million registered users in India and over 1 million driver partners across more than 110 cities. On an aggregate basis, the company claims to serve as many as a billion rides in India annually through its platform. NEWDELHI: India’s biggest two cities—delhi and Mumbai—and its two most populous states—uttar Pradesh and Bihar—face the worst call quality, a top government official said on Tuesday.

The government has asked telcos to improve coverage in these regions at the earliest, telecom secretary Aruna Sundararajan told reporters after meeting top executives from the telecom sector.

“Overall, if we look at the country, many parts of the south, particularly Tamil Nadu, Chennai, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana... the complaints are about 30-33% (of the total number of complaints). Whereas the worst affected areas seem to be Delhi, Mumbai, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. We have asked them to specifically take measures for these places where the call drops are the worst and put those on fast track,” Sundararajan said.

The department of telecommunications (DOT) plans to meet operators every month to review their progress and has asked chief executives officers of telecom companies to monitor this issue.

In the meeting, the DOT reviewed the status of dropped calls across India, across specified routes and in Mumbai and Delhi.

The operators were also told to ensure mobile coverage at all international and national airports, major hospitals and high- ways, Sundararajan said.

“We will monitor this (call quality) strictly...every month... TSPS (telecom service providers) said, in their own figures, that call drops have been more or less stable and there is distinct improvement since December because of investments in infrastructure,” she said, adding that “although the absolute number of call drops has come down, but other kinds of problems are coming in the network like the voice fade out and (caller is) not available.”

Operators, on the other hand, highlighted slow approvals for setting up signal towers, pressure on networks due to increasing data and voice traffic, high concurrent usage per base transceiver station and uncertified mobile handsets, among others, as issues that were affecting quality of service.