TRAI mulls penalty on operators not meeting new QoS norms for December quarter

NEW DELHI: The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) is set to penalise phone companies for not meeting quality of service (QoS) norms in specific circles in line with tougher conditions that the watchdog issued in October, people familiar with the matter said. Carriers have not met the required benchmarks for call quality and call drops in the October-December period, they said.

“The authority had issued show-cause notices to all telcos (and) their responses have come,” said a senior official.

“Some financial disincentives will be levied on those that are not satisfactory.”


Another person said that internally, penalties to tune of “tens of crores” have been suggested as most have not complied with either one or the other benchmark in some circles.

This could trigger another spat between the industry and the regulator following on from disputes over several issues previously, including call drops in 2015. At the time, Trai had mandated telcos should compensate users for each dropped call, but the Supreme Court scrapped the rule after the carriers appealed.

Trai issued tighter rules on service quality effective October 1. Under these, telcos would need to pay Rs 1 lakh to Rs 5 lakh — depending on the extent of the violation — in a quarter, subject to a cap of Rs 10 lakh in a three-month period, starting January 1, 2018.

The probable penalties will follow show-cause notices that were sent under the new QoS rules in early March, after examining October-December call drop data submitted by all carriers including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India, Idea Cellular and Reliance Jio.

The carriers are learnt to have responded to the show-cause notices, saying that they were enabling their systems to provide reports in line with the new rules.

As the data was being reported for the first time, there would be some margin of error, they said.

Airtel, Vodafone India, Idea and Jio did not respond to queries on the showcause notices. The QoS rules measure call quality at a more granular level — at the tower rather than in a circle — and are aimed at reducing call drops and improving service in the smallest of areas.

The Cellular Operators Association of India which represents all carriers, had called Trai’s new QoS rules “more stringent.”

The contentious issue of call drops has pitted the industry and the government against each other, with the latter rebuking telcos for the rising number of call drops over the past few months as they move from 2G and 3G services to offering 4G and 4G VoLTE services, thus changing their networks and expanding capacities. Telcos though had said it wasn’t all their fault as they couldn’t put up towers due to fears of radiation and arbitrary local laws, and have pledged to invest in improving networks.