 "Ram Sewak Sharma")
Worried over worsening call drop menace, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on wednesday asked the government for powers to penalise mobile operators as most of them have failed to meet the quality benchmark in this regard.
"As hon'ble Supreme Court in its judgement has observed that Trai does not have power to impose such (call drop) penalty on telecom operators, we will write to DoT (Department of Telecommunications) today for amendment in Trai Act to give us more power," Trai Secretary Sudhir Gupta said.
The Supreme Court recently quashed a rule, which mandated telecom operators to compensate consumers rupee one for each call drop with upper limit at Rupee three per day.
At present, disputes between consumers and telecom operators are not taken up by consumer courts as a Supreme Court judgement of 2009 had barred seeking any such relief under the Consumer Protection Act, saying a special remedy is provided under the Indian Telegraph Act.
The National Telecom Policy 2012 envisages, to undertake legislative measures to bring disputes between telecom consumers and service providers within the jurisdiction of consumer forums established under the Consumer Protection Act. However, it is yet to be executed by the government.
Trai today published the result of a test drive conducted in Delhi between May 3-6, and in next 15 days will publish the result of a test drive conducted in 12 cities.
While telecom operators claim to have improved network by installing additional mobile towers, the report said, "All 3G networks and 2G networks of Airtel, MTNL and CDMA network of RCom have shown degradation in performance compared to previous drive test."
In the latest test drive conducted by the Trai in Delhi, state-run telecom operator MTNL failed on all network based quality of service parameters.
"Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance, Aircel and Idea need to further improve the Call Drop Rate performance. The CDMA operators and MTNL need to improve across all parameters, in order to offer acceptable levels of service," Trai said.
"In case of Call Drop Rate most of the operators except Reliance 2G and Vodafone 3G are not meeting the threshold of the benchmark," noted the Trai report.
The regulator found Aircel was using Radio Link Time (RLT) Out more than its peers to mask call drops.
"Most operators have improved their network performance. However, in case of network of Aircel, it is noticed that the RLT value in most of the cells has increased. If RLT values are assumed to be 40 in case of Aircel, its present call drop rate of 2 per cent would increase to approximately 5.8 per cent," Trai report said.
Trai Member Anil Kaushal said it is a matter of discussion on the level of RLT that telecom operators should be, and the vigilance and monitoring arm of the Department of Telecom, TERM Cell, is investigating the matter.
Trai launched a dedicated website for publishing result of test drive that it conducts every quarter. It also launched a mobile application for filing pesky calls and sms complaints in an easy manner.
"The application is available on Android and will be soon launched for Apple iOS soon. It will ease filing of complaints and also help us in monitoring action taken by telecom operators on complaints," Kaushal added.
The application shows SMS received and calls received by a subscriber, and provides option to select pesky numbers from the list by just clicking on it.
Kaushal said Trai is looking at various options to ensure that telecom operators work to improve service quality and the regulator may even review call drop parameter which is set at 2%.
It had fixed penalty of up to Rs 2 lakh for poor mobile service quality, including call drops. This penalty kicks in for more than 2% call drops in a quarter in one telecom circle.
