TRAI Penalises Telcos With Rs 80 Cr In 3 Months For QoS Issues

Sector regulator TRAI has placed a penalty of Rs 80 crore on various telecom operators for failing to provide optimum quality of services. Service providers of all sort – cellular, fixed line broadband – have been penalized by the regulator.

Interestingly this penalty amount is for the operators’ service failure in last three months ended June, 2018, telecom minister Manoj Sinha said in a written reply in Lok Sabha.

He responded to a specific question on whether the TRAI has imposed any penalty on telecom operators for failing to meet various quality of service benchmarks.

“From the monitoring of performance of TSPs it is observed that the TSPs are generally complying with the benchmarks for various QoS parameters. However, some of the service providers are not complying with the benchmarks for some of the parameters in some of the service areas,” said Sinha.

Of this Rs 80 crore, TRAI has put a penalty of Rs 54 crore for failing to provide benchmarked quality of service in 2G services and Rs 20 crore in lack of QoS in 4G services. Penalties levied for lack of QoS in 3G, fixed lines and broadband services are placed at Rs 32 lakh, Rs 4 lakh and Rs 26 lakh respectively.

Offering some sample data on QoS failures by the telecom service providers, the minister informed that there are 95 instances of non-compliance of service benchmarks by various operators during March quarter of this year. Of these 84 instances are on cellular services, 6 instances on fixed services and 5 instances of QoS failures in broadband services.

TRAI has set some benchmarks on each of service proved by the telecom service providers and whenever the benchmarks are not met, the regulator imposes financial disincentives. The financial disincentives are imposed on telcos for non-compliance with the benchmarks for network related parameters and customer related parameters, such as fault repair, network accessibility, call drop, billing complaints, termination of service, refund of security deposit etc.  – Tele Analysis