Background: Last week, telecom lobbying association COAI said in a letter to TRAI that a manufacturing glitch in MediaTek chipsets affected service quality offered by telcos. The issue was apparently widespread in dual SIM devices: whenever a 4G SIM is placed in the secondary slot, flow of data gets affected since the secondary slot is meant for a 2G SIM only, COAI claimed. Although MediaTek initially said that it was working on fixing the issue, it has now put out a divergent statement: “It has been inaccurately reported that this dual-SIM issue is only apparent in MediaTek powered phones," MediaTek said. It also agreed to the fact that the issue was present in chipsets it manufactures but added that “the reduced data rate is not necessarily noticeable to users.” The chipset maker also pointed out that “half of the eight devices that COAI cited as causing network degradation, are powered by other chipset makers or competitors to MediaTek”. The company added that it was able to confirm the “networking slowing effect” after conducting its own set of tests on non-MediaTek mobile phones. COAI had claimed that the glitch “significantly deteriorates throughput of any other operator’s 4G SIM...by as much as 40%.” ‘We have designed a solution for the glitch’: MediaTek The chipset maker also said that it has developed a software-based optimization method to improve network performance on dual-SIM phones. This is now being tested with mobile operators, according to its statement. “Once the solution is fully tested and approved -…
