Trai issues norms against call drops; defaulters to pay up to Rs 10 lakh

Fine amount to increase in each quarter in case the operator fails to meet the benchmark

Telecom regulator TRAI on Friday issued stringent guidelines to curb call drops along with a penalty of up to Rs 10 lakh on service providers if they fail to meet the benchmark for three consecutive quarters.

"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 told reporters in New Delhi.

TRAI Secretary (Acting) SK Gupta said if an operator fails to meet call drop benchmark in the consecutive quarter, the penalty amount will be increased 1.5 times, and for failure in the third consecutive month, this will be doubled.

"However, there is a cap of Rs 10 lakh on financial disincentive," Gupta said.

Under the previous Quality of Service Rule, penalty on call drop was Rs 50,000 per violation.

After the revision, the regulator has made the measurement of call drop rate more granular from circle level to mobile towers in a circle.

"There have been some issues in measurement of call drop. Averages hide a lot of things. Under the new rules, we are taking into account temporary issues that may be there in the network as well as the geographical spread of the network," Sharma said.

Under the revised rule, 90 per cent of base transceiver station or mobile site in a telecom circle 90 per cent of time should not fail to handle 98 per cent of the call, which means not more than 2 per cent calls handled by them should drop.

In worst affected case or busy hour of the day, not more than 3 per cent of call drop should be registered on 90 per cent of mobile towers in a telecom circle.

The regulator also fixed benchmark for radio-link time out technology(RLT) - allegedly used by telecom operators for masking call drop.

RLT is used for continuation of a call in case a subscriber is moving or is in base network area for short period. It is the time used for connecting call of a subscriber from one mobile tower to another.