The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India sticks to its decision making the telecom companies compensate the consumers from January 1 for call drops.

After a meeting with the operators here on Thursday, the regulator said that it will not change the date of the regulation (January 1), and asked the telecom service providers (TSPs) to be ready, as they have given enough time (two-and-a-half months).

The regulator will also continue to do road tests in Delhi and Mumbai on quality of services in near future. It will add five more cities, including Bhubaneswar, Indore, Patna, Pune and Surat, in its next round of road tests in December.

TRAI had recently come out with a regulation asking TSPs to compensate ₹1 on each call drop with a cap of ₹3 per day from January 1. “While some operators had improved on some parameters but broadly, the situation had not improved much and that certainly is a cause of concern. We discussed this issue with them and said ‘you had promised us to improve the performance but there is no improvement’,” RS Sharma, Chairman, TRAI, told reporters here.

However, the TSPs responded saying these drive tests had been done on the roads particularly where network coverage is not good, to which TRAI has told them such questions do not arise.

“We have decided that now we will select the roads randomly in Delhi and Mumbai and change the methodology of these drive tests,” he said, adding that existing routes will be included in next survey since the quality of services were not satisfactory.

New web page He said that TRAI will create a new page on its website – mapping the condition of network services in each area of the country – so that consumer can choose the best network. TRAI will create a quality of service map for the entire country where it should be able to go to particular area, see which operators are working there and what is their the quality of services.

comment COMMENT NOW