TRAI to ask DoT for more powers to penalise mobile companies for call drops

TRAI, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, has asked the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) for more powers so that it can penalise mobile operators that don’t act upon the issue of call drops despite several warnings.

TRAI secretary Sudhir Gupta told ET that most Indian telcos have failed to meet the minimum criteria for quality of services in New Delhi.

It’s been a week that the Supreme Court had struck down its order, which required operators to compensate consumers Rs 1 for each call drop with the upper limit at Rs 3 per day. Currently, any disputes between telecom operators and their subscribers do not go to the consumer courts because the Supreme Court had barred any such relief under the Consumer Protection Act in 2009.

It’s been quite some time that TRAI wants to levy penalties on telcos for call drops. The regulator is now looking at options to make sure that Indian telcos improve their service quality, passing the call drop parameter set at 2% of all calls made from the network.

"All 3G networks, 2G networks of Airtel and MTNL and CDMA network of RCom have shown degradation in performance compared to previous test drives," said a release from TRAI about the test it did to check the quality. Even the state-run MTNL failed when checked on an all network-based quality-of-service parameter.

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