Again penalty for Telecom operators ? TRAI to decide on penalty for call drops
The department of telecommunications (DoT) has asked the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to design a framework that will look at arresting call drops and decide whether erroring operators need to be penalised. In an interview with Business Standard, Communications and Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said: "This is a serious issue. A proper architecture has to be framed to deal with call drops issue and TRAI will examine this and suggest ways including whether penalty has to be imposed or not on telecom players."
TRAI focusing on telecom operators for best service provide to users. In their observation they found that radiation levels were increased by some networks so recently they fined 10.8 crores. Soon after this TRAI further found that call drops were occuring regularly so again telecom operators gonna face penalty for this. decision yet to take
Mobile consumers have been faced with frequent call drops and the situation has worsened over the past few months, forcing the government to step in and take some measures. Ram Sewak Sharma the chairman of TRAI also met the minister on Friday in the morning to discuss various issues, including call drops. The minister said: "It (call drops) is indeed an issue which impinges on telecom operators credit worthiness. Operators need to optimize their networks and reinforce their systems."
While taking charge this Monday, Sharma said the issue of call drops would be dealt with on priority. "We will introduce new technologies to determine the root cause of various problems. Call drop, for example, is something we can analyse with the help of technology and suggest possible solutions."
Call drops happen because of various issues such as congestion in the networks, scarcity of spectrum and fewer number of tower sites, as many residential welfare associations do not allow tower sites to be installed due to radiation fears. Prasad made it very clear that the operators would have to improve their infrastructure. Voice can't be the casualty of a high growth in the data services.
He said the department had been taking proactive measures to resolve certain issues such as installation of in-building solutions and tower sites in the government buildings and talking to state governments for setting up more tower sites. "The spectrum sharing guidelines will also help operators to reduce the call drop problems," he said.
When asked telco's are disappointed over the spectrum sharing norms, he said if an operator has acquired spectrum at market price, we can't allow it to be shared with spectrum of another operator who got the spectrum at administrative price, means bundled with license. This week government gave a go-ahead to the much awaited spectrum sharing guidelines which will allow operators to share their unutilized spectrum with each other and will help them resolve network congestion in many areas.
Earlier, DoT had also asked Trai to suggest an incentive/disincentive scheme on call drops. Uninor is the only operator which compensates its users. For every call drop, Uninor subscribers get one minute credited to their account. Also, the department of telecom conducted a special audit to assess the coverage and quality of service of all telecom players in the metros. The telecom players have been regularly updating the department on various actions they have been taking to arrest call drops including up-gradation of their capacity as well as on network expansion.
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