Telecom operators will now have to pay hefty penalties for call drops. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Friday issued stringent guidelines with a penalty of up to ₹10 lakh on companies if they fail to meet the benchmark for three consecutive quarters.

“We have proposed a financial disincentive in the range of ₹1 lakh to ₹5 lakh. It is a graded penalty system, depending on the performance of a network,” RS Sharma, Chairman, TRAI, said here.

However, if an operator fails to meet the call drop benchmark in consecutive quarters, the penalty amount will be increased 1.5 times and in the third consecutive month it will be doubled, said another senior official.

“There is cap of ₹10 lakh on the financial disincentive,” said Secretary (Acting), TRAI, SK Gupta, said.

According to the amendments to the Quality of Service (QoS) regulations, the methodology for assessment of drop call rate (DCR) will be on a percentile basis instead of the existing methodology of the average of call drop of all towers.

Granular measurement Under the QoS rule, the penalty on call drops was ₹50,000 per violation. After the revision, TRAI has made measurement of the call drop rate more granular from the circle level to mobile towers in a circle. “There have been some issues in measurement of call drops. Averages hide a lot of things. Under the new rules, we are taking into account temporary issues that may be there in the network as well as geographical spread of the network,” said Sharma.

Under the revised rule, not more than 2 per cent of the calls handled by networks should drop. Similarly, during busy hours of the day, not more than 3 per cent of call drops should be registered on 90 per cent of mobile towers in a telecom circle, the regulator said. TRAI also fixed the benchmark for radio link timeout (RLT) technology as operators have configured RLT value on the higher side in some areas to camouflage call drops.

RLT is used for continuation of a call in case a subscriber is moving or is in the base network area for short period. It is the time used for connecting the call of a subscriber from one mobile tower to another.

However, inappropriate, high RLT values may affect call drop rate statistics and the calls that were supposed to be registered as dropped by the network may be registered as released by users as they will initiate release of call because of poor QoS, TRAI added.

“As the voluminous amendment with multiple recommendations have just been published, we are still studying the new regulations on the changed methodology of measurement to fully understand their impact on the industry,” said Rajan S Mathews, Director General, COAI.

comment COMMENT NOW