Call Drop: Telcos Warn of Hike in Mobile Tariffs

The telcos also indicated that Trai did not have jurisdiction to levy penalties. Recently it issued directive asking telcos to compensate users for call drops, a ruling which could dent profits severely.

In the letter, the associations said: “During the consultation process including the open house discussion, the service providers had made detailed submissions, which remain unaddressed and unanswered in the TRAI regulation”.

Come 2016 India’s service providers may have to pay subscribers who experience dropped calls a fee of 1 Indian rupee ($0.015) per incident up to a maximum of INR3 ($0.05) every day, according to new regulatory proposals.

Rajan Mathews, director general of Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) said, “Trai has called for a meeting with all CEOs on October 29 at noon to discuss call drops and the recent Trai regulation on it”. As per this mandate, telcos must intimate pre-paid customers through SMS or USSD within four hours after a call drop, and detail the amount credited.

The document is their first plan of attack to facilitate negotiations and will be signed by players such as Vodafone, Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, Idea and Tata Teleservices. “We’re hoping that Trai will consider the points that we have raised, and take a close look at the true resolution to the problem. It provides an opportunity to game the system and thus, have the operators incur heavy financial losses”, he added.

Variances in the new rules will be pointed out in the communication, for example, which company is accountable for call drop and, hence, would be penalised if a call drops when the phone runs out of battery or when a consumer enters an elevator, a common area where network coverage is minimal. The letter comes a day before executives from top telcos would meet the Trai chairman, to discuss the regulation and issues on it. Telecom companies have red flagged the financial impact of a minimum of Rs 10,000 crore, which can go up to a staggering Rs 54,000 crore annually, in the worst case scenario.

Analysts claim call drops do not constitute more than 2% of the total calls in the country.

In a joint letter to Trai, COAI and AUSPI, the two industry bodies, have said that the scheme of compensation, far from reducing call drops, will result in a sharp increase in call drops as countless customers will cause the calls to drop to obtain Rs 3 per day as compensation.

“Therefore, this new mandatory compensation payable by the originating operator that too for complying with the mandated quality of service norms, is not only self-contradictory, a double jeopardy”.

“The market is already agog with talk that all a consumer has to do is to engineer three call drops every day, and get Rs 90 reduction in the monthly bill”.