Telecom companies ask TRAI not to penalise them over minor service issues

NEW DELHI: Telecom companies have asked the sector regulator to take a pragmatic view on levying penalties, especially over marginal deviations from quality of service benchmarks as some of those may have been caused by natural events such as floods or heavy rains.

Carriers have argued that deviations may have been due to unforeseen circumstances, system failures or factors beyond the control of the carriers, for which they should not be penalised, and have sought for individual hearings to explain their stand.

“We request that these nominal or marginal deviations from the prescribed benchmarks should be waived off and no financial disincentives should be imposed on the operators,” the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) said in a letter to the telecom regulator last week, adding that certain marginal deviations were not material enough to attract financial disincentives when a large number of customers were being served.

ET has seen a copy of the letter.

The association, which represents all private sector carriers including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India, Idea Cellular and Reliance Jio, said the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) should take a ‘pragmatic and considerate view’ on the marginal deviations and sought for a “review of all financial incentive orders” issued from the quarter ended March 2017 onwards.

Rajan Mathews, the association’s director-general, said Trai needed to work with the carriers to address systemic issues, “instead of continuing to slap on penalties which are often quashed or reduced substantially by the courts”.

The view comes even as the regulator is preparing to levy new penalties on carriers based on quality of service benchmarks which came into effect from October 2017. ET reported recently that the regulator was preparing to issue penalties on carriers for not meeting quality-of-service rules in certain circles as per the tougher parameters.

The new rules have toughened the parameters determining call drops, with penalties of a maximum of Rs 10 lakh for every violation.

The likely latest penalties, or financial disincentives, will follow show-cause notices that were sent out by the regulator in early March, after going through the call drop data submitted by all carriers including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India, Idea Cellular and Reliance Jio.

The carriers are learnt to have responded to Trai on the notices, saying that they were enabling their systems to report as per the new rules and added that the data were being reported for the first time, therefore it could have some small margin for errors.

In its May 3 letter, COAI also flagged cases in the past where for minor deviations in the previous quarter, no financial penalties were imposed, but said that of late, the penalties had been compounded to the maximum limit, factoring in consecutive violations.