Trai rejects companies' plea to delay penalty regime for call drops

NEW DELHI: The telecom regulator has rejected a request by operators for an additional six months to implement a new penalty regime for call drops, which is set to kick in from October 1.

“We have received a letter from COAI (Cellular Operators’ Association of India) and responded to it,” RS Sharma, Chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, told ET. “The service quality issue is consumer-centric and it does not require any extra preparation. They (telcos) already have data which they share with us. There is no new system required to compute data.” COAI represents companies including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular, besides Reliance Jio Infocomm.

In new rules issued on August 18, Trai set penalties of up to Rs 10 lakh per circle in aquarter on operators failing to meet voice quality benchmarks. The penalties are graded and will be levied from January 1, three months after the rules kick in. The period to December end will be used to observe call drop information that telcos share with the regulator.

“It is important that the QoS (quality of service) regulation is implemented at the earliest and it requires computation starting from October 1, with effective implementation from January 2018,” Sharma said.

The quality of voice services will now be measured at the base station level instead of the circle-wise to overcome a shortcoming in the earlier methodology that masked individual non-operational mobile sites.