The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has reportedly imposed Rs 11 crore penalty on Indian GSM and CDMA telcos for bad service quality including call drops, according to Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha.
While informing the Rajya Sabha, Sinha said that the regulator imposes financial disincentives for non-compliance with the benchmarks for Quality of Service parameters including call drops. He said that the Trai monitors the performance of service providers through quarterly performance monitoring reports and publishes the same on its website.
"From analysis of the quarterly performance monitoring reports of September 2015, December 2015, March 2016 and June 2016 available on Trai website, it has been noticed that there has been consistent improvement in the performance of service providers in meeting the benchmark for call drop parameters," Sinha was quoted as saying by PTI.
The regulator, according to the minister, slapped highest penalty of Rs 3 crore on Aircel for not meeting set quality parameters for 2G service. The telco has also been slapped Rs 1.56 crore penalty for poor 3G service quality.
The Trai imposed penalty worth Rs 2.27 crore on state-run telco BSNL for failing to meet 2G service quality parameters and Rs 70 lakh penalty for breaching 3G service quality benchmark. Similarly, Vodafone India was slapped with Rs 84 lakh Vodafone for non-compliance with 2G benchmark, and Rs 2.5 lakh for breaching 3G service quality benchmark.
The regulator imposed Rs 1.64 crore on Anil Ambani-led Reliance Communications (RCom), Rs 89 lakh penalty on Tata Teleservices, Rs 84 lakh Vodafone, Rs 40 lakh on Bharti Airtel, Rs 13.5 lakh on Telenor, and Rs 3 lakh on Sistema Shyam Teleservices, which offers services under MTS India brand.
MTNL, which offers services in Mumbai and Delhi, was slapped with Rs 1.5 lakh penalty for failing to meet 2G service quality parameters.
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The Minister also informed the Rajya Sabha said that telcos have already installed more than 1,60,000 additional Base Transceiver Stations across the country during the six and half month period from June 15, 2016 to December 31, 2016.
These telcos further plan to deploy around 1.1 lakh additional BTSs across India by March 31, 2017.
