Telecom firms slapped Rs 2.6cr fine in 3 quarters for call drops

Vodafone faced the highest penalty of Rs 1.56 crore during three quarters to June 2018 for non-compliance with the benchmarks for various quality of service parameters including call drop, Parliament was informed Thursday.

A total penalty of Rs 2.61 crore was imposed on various telecom companies, including state-run BSNL and Vodafone, for not meeting the quality of service parameters during the three quarters, according to the data tabled in the House.

The penalty has been imposed based on new rule implemented by Trai with effect from October 1, 2017, telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad informed the Rajya Sabha.

According to the data shared by the minister, a penalty of Rs 1.56 crore was imposed on Vodafone, Rs 50 lakh on Aircel, Rs 29.5 lakh on Tata Teleservices, Rs 13 lakh each on state-run telecom firm BSNL and Telenor from December quarter 2017 to June quarter 2018.

The minister was replying to a question on the amount of penalty imposed on telecom companies for call drop.

In a separate reply, Prasad said that as per the Quarterly Performance Monitoring Report (PMR) of Trai for cellular services for the quarter ending September 2018, all the service providers were largely complying with benchmark for all the parameters in all the licence service areas.

However, non-compliance was noticed in the network of Tata in 18 telecom circles, Idea in 15 circles, Vodafone in 5 circles, Airtel & BSNL in 3 circles each and RJio in 1 circle, Prasad said.

Also for fixed-ine connections, Airtel in 11 telecom circles, Tata in nine and MTNL in two circles were non-compliant to service quality norms, according to Prasad.