Re 1 for each dropped call

Call drops may soon earn consumers compensation of Rs1 per minute, with sources saying telecom regulator Trai had finalised its recommendations and may announce a policy as early as Friday.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has expressed concern over call drops and directed telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to take all possible measures to deal with the situation.

TRAI is also considering making it mandatory for telecom operators to disclose their network capacities periodically, as the regulator feels that call drop problem needs to be examined in entirety.

Simply put, in a given day a consumer will be compensated for up to three call drops even if the frequency of drops is higher.

The penalty will kick-in if call drops in a quarter average more than 2 per cent of the total traffic in a telecom circle. “For non-compliance with customer-related parameters the financial disincentives imposed is Rs 50,000 per parameter”, the TRAI release said.

Currently, a dropped call is defined as one that does not continue for at least 90 to 120 seconds after it is set up.

The government, on its part disagrees on the spectrum point, but has issued advisories stating that radiation fears from telecom towers was unfounded.

Interestingly, Trai has not mentioned anything about compensation to users, which was the centre of the debate on disincentivization of call drops.

“From the monitoring of performance of cellular mobile telephone operators, Trai observed that the present amount of financial disincentives has not acted as a sufficient deterrent against non-compliance as there have been repeated consecutive cases of non-compliance with the benchmarks”, the telecom regulator said in a statement on Thursday. “It is a serious issue and we can not not take responsibility”.

TRAI has found no significant improvement in the call drop issue in Mumbai and Delhi as operators are lagging on various fronts in meeting the standards.

Airtel had a call drop rate of 6.58 per cent in Delhi while Vodafone came in with 4.74 per cent. But Airtel has shown a few improvement, compared with the July audit that had shown a call drop rate of 8.04 per cent.

The Minister named telecom operators like Airtel, Aircel, Idea, Vodafone and Tata Telecom among those having contained the problem and said almost half of the defective mobile sites have been fixed to address the menace.