TRAI has charged fine on some telecom operators that includes Jio, Airtel NSE 0.44 %, Vodafone and Idea, for dropping on some service quality standards in March quarter. The Amends cover some service areas, and all the operators are in the action of making the payment.
Almost Rs 34 lakhs penalty has been charged on Jio, the intrusive operator whose atonements since 2016 have jolted the market.
The charge on Jio is on account of TRAI -defined quality services, that includes point of Interconnect crowding, accessibility of call centers, and percentage of calls answered by operators in a set time interval.
To improve the service quality in the sector, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI)
had toughened the rules and asked operators to stand by the new quality of service standards from October 1, 2017.
The new judgment shows how the operators have handled between January and March 2018 on TRAI‘s new service quality standards.
Bharti Airtel — the largest telecom operator in the nation till the alliance of Vodafone and Idea Cellular shuffled the pecking order late last month — has been charged an amount of Rs 11 lakhs for the three months to March.
Its fines are on account of measures relating to metering and billing (postpaid), accessibility of call center, the percentage of calls answered by operators within the defined time interval.
The penalty charged on Idea Cellular is about Rs 12.5 lakhs for the March quarter.
The fine refers to various services like call drops and percentage of calls answered by operators within a set time interval.
In case of Vodafone, the penalties stood at about Rs 4 lakhs on problems like metering and billing, time taken to satisfy a request for closure of service, and percentage of calls answered by operators within a set time interval.
While Airtel declined to comment, Idea Cellular and Vodafone did not answer to e-mails objections on the issue.
TRAI Chairman R S Sharma had earlier told that the regulator is in the last stage of charging fine on operators which have not met service quality benchmarks for the March quarter but had not given data.
TRAI has been upholding that it does not want to name any operator or charges imposed on them for not meeting the service quality criteria. Accordingly, it has never announced this data either on its website or through a statement.
As per the latest quality of service norms of TRAI, now call drops are measured at mobile tower level instead of telecom circle level.
