Telecom Regulatory Authority of Indian (TRAI) made it mandatory for mobile service providers (MSPs) to compensate consumers call drops with effect from 1 January 2016.
The notification was issued by the TRAI as ninth amendment to the Telecom Consumer Protection Regulations, 2012.
What is the notification?
- In case of call drops, credit the account of the calling consumer by one rupee. However, such credit in the account of the calling consumer will be limited to three dropped calls in a day.
- Send a message through SMS/USSD to the calling consumer within four hours of the occurrence of call drop and details of the amount credited into his account.
- In case of post-paid consumers provide the detail of the credit in the next bill.
The implementation of the mandate will be closely watched by the TRAI. It will also keep watch on the measures being initiated by service providers to minimise the problem of dropped calls.
TRAI will undertake a review of the mandate and its implementation after six months.
What is a call drop?
Call drop represents the service provider’s inability to maintain a call once it has been correctly established, that is, calls dropped or interrupted prior to their normal completion by the user, the cause of the early termination being with the service provider’s network.
Reason behind TRAI’s decision
In the past one year, the instances of call drops have increased too much causing too much problem to the consumers.
As a result of this, TRAI had in June 2015 and July 2015 conducted drive tests in Mumbai and Delhi, which showed unsatisfactory network quality. TRAI than convened a meeting of all telecom operators to improve quality of network.
Currently, the call drop issue has been started to improve. Telecom operators like Airtel, Aircel, Idea, Vodafone and Tata Tele have been able to contain the problem and nearly half of the defective mobile sites have been fixed to address the problem.
