Consumers to get ₹1 for every call drop

Consumers could be soon compensated for call drops. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is set to notify a compensation of ₹1 for every call drop with a daily cap of ₹3.

Simply put, in a given day a consumer will be compensated for up to three call drops even if the frequency of drops is higher. Official sources told BusinessLine that the details are expected to come out on Friday.

Consumers will start getting the benefit soon after the TRAI notification.

While consumers will benefit, the telecom players will take a hit and may move court. Companies such as Vodafone, Airtel, Reliance, and Idea Cellular have been trying to resolve the issue and are already working on improving their networks, but are yet to succeed.

In fact, the issue of call drops was discussed in a meeting between Vodafone Group CEO Vittorio Colao and Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Wednesday. Colao agreed that call drops were a problem in major cities that needed to be resolved.

An official from one of the leading telecom companies said, “Something like compensation of one rupee for each call is not possible for service providers who have tariffs/billing on per second basis.”

TRAI, which has done surveys in Delhi and Mumbai to ascertain the issue of call drops, has found that it continues to be a concern.

In its report published on Thursday – Audit and Assessment of Quality of Service of service providers through independent agencies for Cellular Mobile Telephone Services, Basic Services and Broadband Services – TRAI has found that ‘the results showed unsatisfactory network quality’.

“In Mumbai none of the operators are meeting the prescribed benchmark, there is marginal improvement in some of the operators, while in Delhi some of the operators have improved the benchmark and three operators are still not meeting the benchmark,” it said.

The report said Airtel’s quality has improved, but is still to meet the set parameters.

There has been some improvement in call drop on the network of Aircel, Idea Cellular and Tata Teleservices in Mumbai, while the problem has worsened on the networks of Vodafone, Airtel and Reliance Communications, it noted.

Meanwhile, the sector regulator has also issued ‘The standards of quality service of basic telephony service (wireline) and cellular mobile telephone service regulations 2015’ in which it will impose a financial disincentive for non-compliance with the benchmarks.

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