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Podcast | Here's all you need to know about TRAI’s war against call drops

TRAI has been in the news of late for taking a stance against tardiness by telecom operators with regard to QoS, or quality of service in certain circles, especially call drops

May 18, 2018 / 06:19 PM IST

TRAI, or the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, has been in the news of late for taking a stance against tardiness by Telecom operators with regard to QoS, or quality of service in certain circles, especially call drops. According to the Economic Times, the agency is unimpressed that Carriers failed to meet benchmarks for call quality and call drops in the October-December period.

Earlier this month, TRAI had issued show-cause notices to all telecom companies. Some sources have suggested that, internally, penalties totalling up to “tens of crores” have been discussed because most of the telcos have failed to comply with benchmarks.

The tough talk by the regulator could trigger a standoff between the industry and TRAI. This is one more in a string of disputes over several issues, including call drops, dating back to 2015. At that time, Trai had mandated that telcos must compensate users for each dropped call. However, the Supreme Court scrapped the rule after the carriers appealed.

Ram Sewak Sharma, the Chairman of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, says call drops strike at the heart of the consumer and make for a powerful consumer issue. He said call drops are not a "theoretical construct", but a real issue.

Telecom operators have said that TRAI should take what they call a pragmatic view. “We request that these nominal or marginal deviations from the prescribed benchmarks be waived off and no financial disincentives be imposed on the operators,” the Cellular Operators Association of India said in a letter to the telecom regulator a couple of weeks ago. They added that certain marginal deviations were not material enough to attract financial disincentives when a large number of customers were being served.

The COAI, which represents all private sector carriers including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India, Idea Cellular and Reliance Jio, sought a “review of all financial incentive orders” issued from the quarter ended March 2017 onwards.

TRAI’s chairman Sharma, for his part, laughed off suggestions that the regulator should “take a pragmatic view on call drops”, and brushed aside views that an Ombudsman was unnecessary. Sharma and his team wouldn’t be in the wrong if they were to claim credit for the centre’s May 1st decision to approve the setting up of an Ombudsman, years after the regulator first sent the proposal. The chairman, who will be retiring in August 2018, has repeatedly taken telcos to task over the menace of call drops.

The office of the Ombudsman, which will be technology driven, is to set up under TRAI with an aim to resolve consumer grievances, he said in an interview. “The ombudsman is supposed to work like a deterrent in some sense because ultimately the quality of complaint resolution currently is not extremely good. Why is it not good? Because the telecom service provider is the first point of authority that will resolve the issue. Then, the second one is also controlled and owned by the service provider. So it’s like the party is the judge,” says the chairman of TRAI, mincing no words.

Elaborating on his observation that the ombudsman’s job in this scenario will be driven by technology, Sharma said, “Verification of truth is extremely easy because of the digital footprints of the activities happening there.” He claims that what the regulator has proposed is essentially an infrastructure which is light in manpower but fairly advanced in terms of technology. “Technology should become the main level of resolving consumer complaints,” he said.

Rajan Mathews, COAI’s director-general, had earlier expressed a view that disagrees with the TRAI chairman’s ideas. He said TRAI needed to work with the carriers to address systemic issues, “instead of continuing to slap on penalties which are often quashed or reduced substantially by the courts”.

Its easy to see where the association is coming from. The telecom regulator is preparing to levy new penalties on carriers based on quality of service benchmarks which we spoke about earlier. Economic Times had recently reported that TRAI was preparing to issue penalties on carriers for not meeting quality-of-service rules in certain circles as per the tougher parameters.

What penalties? Trai issued tighter rules on service quality effective October 1, 2017. The new rules imply penalties of a maximum of Rs10 lakh for every violation. Prior to this, the regulator had sent out show cause notices in March of this year. This step was taken after studying call drop data submitted by all carriers including Airtel, Vodafone, Idea and Jio. The operators are reported to have responded to TRAI’s show-cause notices claiming they were enabling their systems to provide reports in line with the new rules. Such data was being reported for the first time, they said, because of which there was bound to be some margin of error.

COAI claims that TRAI is being too stringent and should take a more practical approach. Sharma pulled no punches in his reply. He said, “TRAI has always taken a pragmatic view…consumer issues and the call drops and the quality of service are…actually very, very practical problems...It is the consumer that we will continue to guard.”

Telecom companies have pleaded innocence, blaming the inconsistencies on all the variables at play, from arbitrary local laws to people’s fear of radiation from mobile towers. The contentious issue of call drops has pit mobile operators industry against the government, with the govt even rebuking the operators for the rising number of call drops, even as the companies move from 2G and 3G to 4G and 4G VoLTE, which will have an impact on their networks and expanding capacities.

Ram Sewak Sharma gives no quarter to the telecom companies. Taking it on the chin, he says, “TRAI will always get a stick, don’t worry. Even if we say sell it for free, we will get the stick.”

Moneycontrol News
first published: May 18, 2018 06:19 pm

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