TRAI to slap telcos with penalties up to Rs 10 lakh for dropped call from October

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has devised new assessment methods for a better insight into dropped call rates. Along with it comes a new penalty system that will have telecommunication companies failing to meet the service quality standards paying penalties to the tune of Rs 10 lakh.

Under the new regulations chalked out by TRAI, Drop Call Rate (DCR) will be determined on percentile-basis instead of averaging the performance of all telecom service providers for an entire service area during a month. "It will remove the anomaly which was getting introduced due to averaging of DCR of bad performing cells in the network with good or excellent performing cells," TRAI mentioned in a statement.

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The earlier method resulted in telecom service providers achieving the quality benchmarks, but users still troubled with bad network conditions and frequent call drops. The new assessment methodology for dropped call rate will look into area-to-area variations in DCR as well as day-to-day variations in DCR, TRAI further added.

This will help the telecom regulator to pinpoint areas with faulty mobile phone connections as well as days when the network was down. So TRAI can now keep tabs on specific areas and days when the network quality when the network quality was excellent, good or poor. Also, dropped call rates will be assessed across all mobile technologies - GSM, CDMA, WCDMA and LTE - as a whole.

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Penalties for failing to meet the quality of service benchmarks have been increased too. Where telecom companies had to pay Rs 50,000 every quarter for more than two per cent dropped calls, they will have to pay up to Rs 5 lakh for the same period now, depending on the deviation from DCR benchmarks.

Failing to meet the DCR benchmarks for two quarters will lead to one and a half times the quarterly penalty, which is Rs 7.5 lakh, whereas the penalty will be doubled, translating to Rs 10 lakh, if DCR benchmarks are violated for more than two quarters.

TRAI has also tightened norms regarding misuse of Radio Link Timeout (RLT). The Authority had come to know that some operators had set RLT values high to mask call drops as a disconnected call in case of weak network strength.

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