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New Delhi, Telecom regulator TRAI today issued stringent guidelines to curb call drops with a penalty of up to Rs 10 lakh on service providers if they fail to meet the benchmark for three consecutive quarters.
“We have proposed financial disincentive in the range of Rs 1-Rs 5 lakh. It is a graded penalty system depending on the performance of a network,” TRAI Chairman RS Sharma said.
TRAI secretary (acting) SK Gupta explained that if an operator failed to meet the call drop benchmark in consecutive quarters, the penalty amount would be raised 1.5 times and doubled in the third consecutive month. “There is cap of Rs 10 lakh on financial disincentive,” he said.
Under the previous Quality of Service Rule, penalty on call drop was Rs 50,000 per violation. Now the regulator has made measurement of call drop rate more granular — from circle level to mobile towers in a circle. Under the revised rule, 90 per cent of base transceiver station/mobile site in a telecom circle 90 per cent of time should not fail to handle 98 per cent of the calls, which means not more than 2 per cent calls should drop.
During busy hours, not more than 3 per cent call drop should be registered on 90 per cent of mobile towers in a telecom circle. The benchmark for radio-link time out technology (RLT), allegedly used for masking call drops, has been fixed too.
The RLT is used for continuation of a call in case a subscriber is moving or is in base network area for a short period.
