TRAI Fines Telcos Rs 56 Lakh For Call Drops In First Half Of 2018

Dhir Acharya - Dec 23, 2018

Cellular and BSNL are among several telecom service providers paying penalties for not meeting TRAI's call drop benchmark.

On Friday, Parliament announced that TRAI (the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) has issued a Rs 56 lakh penalty on telecom service providers in the first six months of 2018 for not meeting call drop benchmark.

Call drop rate is the percentage of phone calls in which technical problems cause phone calls to suddenly fail before the callers and receivers can finish their conversations or one of them hang up. This figure is usually calculated based on the total number of calls. This rate in conventional networks is extremely low, less than 0.01%; however, in mobile networks the drop call rate is higher, ranging from between 0.1% and a few percents.

In March, Manoj Sinha, Telecom Minister in the Rajya Sabha, shared some data illustrating that the highest penalty imposed was on Tata Teleservices, Rs 22 lakh. Tata was said to have merged its mobile business with Bharti Airtel.

The telecom regulator discovered that state-run BSNL and Idea Cellular failed to meet the benchmark on call drop during the first and second quarters of 2018. Due to that, Idea Cellular had to pay a penalty of Rs 10 lakh for the first quarter and Rs 12 lakh for the second one. On the other hand, BSNL had to pay Rs 2 lakh for the January-March period and Rs 4 lakh for the April-June period.

It was also found that Telenor, the company whose mobile business was also merged with Airtel, suffered from a Rs 6 lakh penalty for not meeting the call drop benchmark.

Regarding this matter, Sinha stated that thanks to relentless efforts, telecom service providers have shown considerable improvements in complying with the service quality benchmark required by TRAI in terms of call drop rate, although the traffic is busier and TRAI has issued stricter benchmark since October 1, 2017.

According to Sinha, telecom service providers have added around 9.4 lakh mobile sites to serve users of 2G, 3G, and 4G-LTE networks since July 2015. Consequently, up to November 2018, there are about 20.07 lakh base stations in total in India.