Telecom regulator TRAI on Friday issued guidelines to restrain call drops and declared a penalty of up to Rs 10 lakh on service providers if they do not meet the standard. “We have proposed financial disincentive in the range of Rs 1-5 lakh. It is a graded penalty system depending on the performance of a network,” TRAI chairman, RS Sharma said.
TRAI Secretary (Acting) SK Gupta said, if an operator fails to meet call drop benchmark, the penalty amount will be augmented 1.5 times. In the third consecutive month it will doubled, he added. “However, there is cap of Rs 10 lakh on financial disincentive,” he said.
Earlier, penalty on call drop was Rs 50,000 per violation.
Post the amendment, the regulator has made measurement of call drop rate more rigid. “There have been some issues in measurement of call drop. Averages hide a lot of things. Under new rules, we are taking into account temporary issues that may be there in the network as well as geographical spread of the network,” Sharma said.
The regulator also fixed scale for radio-link time out technology (RLT), allegedly used by telecom operators. RLT is used for continuation of a call in case a subscriber is moving or is in base network area for a stretch. It is the time used for linking call of a subscriber from one mobile tower to another.
