After Supreme Court recently quashed a rule of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), now the telecom regulator has knocked on the Government’s door to seek powers to penalise mobile operators as most of them have failed to meet the quality benchmark in this regard. The move comes at a time when the regulator finds in its report that some mobile operators fail to improve their performance on the call drops drive test.
“As Hon’ble Supreme Court in its judgment has observed that Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) does not have power to impose such (call drop) penalty on telecom operators, we will write to Department of Telecommunications (DoT) today for amendment in TRAI Act to give us more power,” TRAI Secretary Sudhir Gupta said.
The regulator on Wednesday published result of test drive conducted in Delhi between May 3-6, and in next 15 days it will publish result of test drive conducted in 12 cities. While telecom operators claim to have improved network by installing additional mobile towers, the report said that all 3G networks; 2G networks of Airtel and MTNl and CDMA network of RCom showed degradation in performance compared to previous drive test.
In the latest test drive conducted by TRAI in Delhi, state-run telecom operators MTNl failed on all network based quality of service parameters. “Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance, Aircel and Idea need to further improve the Call Drop Rate performance. The CDMA operators and MTNl need to improve across all parameters, in order to offer acceptable levels of service,” TRAI said in the report, adding that in case of call drop rate most of the operators except Reliance 2G and Vodafone 3G are not meeting the threshold of the benchmark.
Recently, the apex court quashed a rule of the regulator which mandated telecom operators to compensate consumers Rs1 for each call drop with upper limit at Rs3 per day. At present, disputes between consumers and telecom operators are not taken up by consumer courts as a Supreme Court judgement of 2009 had barred seeking any such relief under the Consumer Protection Act, saying a special remedy is provided under the Indian Telegraph Act. The National Telecom Policy 2012 envisages undertaking legislative measures to bring disputes between telecom consumers and service providers within the jurisdiction of consumer forums established under the Consumer Protection Act. However, it is yet to be executed by the Government.
However, the regulator found Aircel was using Radio link Time Out more than its peers to mask call drops. “Most operators have improved their network performance. However, in case of network of Aircel, it is noticed that the RlT value in most of the cells has increased. If RlT values are assumed to be 40 in case of Aircel, its present call drop rate of 2 per cent would increase to approximately 5.8 per cent,” the report added.
TRAI Member Anil Kaushal said it is a matter of discussion on the level of RlT that telecom operators should be and the vigilance and monitoring arm of the Department of Telecom, TERM Cell, is investigating the matter.