Trai seeks stakeholders' views on call-drop compensation

Says investment has not kept pace with the usage

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Friday issued a consultation paper on call drops, proposing that mobile users be compensated for every call drop they suffer.

According to Trai, users should not be charged for calls that get dropped within five seconds. If the call gets dropped after five seconds, the last pulse of the call that got dropped should not be charged.

Trai has sought stakeholders’ comments on how a mobile user should be compensated for call drops — through credit of talk-time in minutes/seconds, credit of talk-time in monetary terms or any other method. Trai will receive comments till September 28.

In June-July, Trai conducted special drive-tests on certain routes of Mumbai and Delhi and found that the call drop rates of most telecom service providers were higher than the benchmark set by Trai.

Between the April-June 2013 quarter and January-March 2015, the growth in minutes of usage (in GSM networks) has been 12 per cent and increase in 2G data usage 106 per cent. The number of 2G-compliant base transceiver stations grew eight per cent during this period. The growth in 3G data was 252 per cent, whereas the number of nodes increased 61 per cent during the same period.

The investment made in the network infrastructure (other than radio spectrum) in wireless access service segment rose 4.6 per cent from Rs 2,02,366 crore in FY13 to Rs 2,11,691 crore in FY14. During this period, minutes of usage grew 6.8 per cent.

“Investment has not kept pace with usage. Thus, prima facie, it appears that lack of investment in network infrastructure by the wireless access providers may be one of the main reasons for the problem of call drops,” Trai said in the paper. The regulator is also considering making mandatory for operators to make periodic disclosures about their network capacities and the steps taken to optimise their networks to address the problem of call drops.

Call drops in mobile networks happen because of various reasons such as lack of radio coverage, radio interference between neighbouring cells, capacity constraints and overload in the network, among others.