New Delhi: On Friday, India’s telecom watchdog declared that all the mobile phone operators will compensate subscribers on all the call drops at the rate of one rupee for any similar failure from January 1, 2016.
A confirmation from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said that, the calling consumer will receive a credit of Re.1 per call drop, that too, to three such occurrences per day in a 24-hour cycle. Following that, the mobile operators will need to send them an SMS that too, within a time frame of 4 hours.
Here is a definition by the regulator for such a failure:
“Call drops mean a voice call which, after being successfully established, is interrupted prior to its normal completion – the cause of the early termination being within the network of the service provider.”
The watchdog confirmed that, it had noticed the representations of telecom operators who maintain that some issues like poor spectrum allocation and difficulties in setting up towers that were beyond their control and resulting to call drops.
It said that the reason behind this is, that the authority has kept the compensatory mechanism simple so that the customers can understand the same quickly, and also, the operators can be able to implement it.
When the watchdog said that the penalty has been doubled for the poor quality service and an operator will be fined up to Rs. 1 lakh for the 1st non-compliance of benchmarks in a quarter which was Rs. 50,000, then after a day, the date for call-drop compensation got declared.
It also said the non-compliance, benchmarked on a few of the 15 parameters under technical and customer care categories, in more than 2 consecutive quarters will result in a penalty up to Rs.1.5 lakh and also, a fine up to Rs. 2 lakh.
If the companies like Airtel, Reliance and Idea do not meet the benchmarks, they will end up paying around Rs.2.3 crore, Rs.1.9 crore and Rs.80 lakh respectively as only only 10% of their subscribers face a situation of a call drop that too in just one day.
The subscribers for Airtel, Reliance and Idea are 23.29 crore, 10.99 crore and 8.33 crore respectively.