Trai fines all four telecom companies for not meeting service quality
10 Sep 2018
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The Telecom regulatory Authority of India (Trai) is reported to have imposed penalties on all major telecom operators, including Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and the now merged Vodafone Idea entity, for failure to meet various service quality benchmarks for the March quarter.
The fines cover various parameters and service areas, and all the operators are in the process of making the payment, sources told PTI.
Bharti Airtel, which was the largest telecom operator in the country till the merger of Vodafone and Idea Cellular, has been fined about Rs11,00,000 for the three months ended March 2018.
Vodafone had to pay a fine of Rs400,000 on issues like metering and billing (pre-paid), time taken to comply with request for termination or closure of service, and percentage of calls answered by operators within a timeframe.
The Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Jio, whose disruptive market entry triggered a bruising tariff war among operators. has been slapped with a fine of Rs34,00,000 for March 2018 quarter.
Jio has been fined for failure to meet Trai-defined service quality parameters, including Point of Interconnect congestion, accessibility of call centres or customer care, and percentage of calls answered by operators (voice to voice) in a set timeframe.
Idea Cellular has been asked to pay a fine of about Rs12,50,000 for the March quarter. The penalties pertain to various circles on parametres like call drops, percentage of calls answered by operators within a set timeframe, and requests for closure of services complied within seven days.
Maintaining its watch on service quality in the sector, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) had tightened the rules and asked players to abide by its new quality of service (QoS) benchmarks from 1 October 2017.
The latest assessment reflects how the operators have fared between January and March 2018 on Trai's new service quality benchmarks.
