DoT Secretary to meet telecom CEOs on Jan 10 to discuss call drops

Trai last year had announced revised quality of service rules, providing for a penalty of Rs 500,000 on operators if they fail to meet benchmarks

The department of telecommunications (DoT) will be meeting top executives of mobile telephone companies on Wednesday to review the continuing problem of call drops.

The meeting, to be chaired by telecom secretary Aruna Sundararajan with the chief executives, will discuss what to do. The latest set of rules on this were issued last year by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai). Officials of DoT will be separately meeting Trai executives the same day on call quality.

"We want to communicate the concerns of the government on the state of call drops...to (ask them to) get their act together," Sundararajan said.

Trai last year had announced revised quality of service rules, providing for a penalty of Rs 500,000 on operators if they failed to meet the benchmarks. The penalty would increase to Rs 1 million in violation of the benchmarks for consecutive quarters.

Trad had also revised the methodology for assessing call drops. The new rules took effect on October 1, 2017.

Separately, the Telecom Commission, highest decision-making body of DoT, meets on Tuesday to discuss a host of issues, including spectrum caps. Trai has recommended removal of caps on spectrum held by mobile operators within a particular band, while proposing a 50 per cent cap on combined airwave holding in efficient bands like 700 MHz, 800 MHz and 900 MHz.

Sundararajan said the Commission would also take up some proposals relating to the Inter-Ministerial Group report, Wi-Fi rollout under broadband connectivity project Bharat Net, and increasing of connectivity in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Under phase-I of Bharat Net, she said, 100,000 gram panchayats had been provided with hi-speed broadband connectivity. Work had started for phase-II. "We hope it will be completed well in time by December 2018," she added.