New Delhi: Coming together against Trai’s regulation on call drops, telecom operators on Wednesday warned that some consumers could engineer call drops to earn compensation of Rs 3 per day and this could have overall affect on the services.
“We believe that the scheme of compensation, far from reducing call drops, will result in a sharp increase in call drops as countless customers will cause the calls to drop to obtain Rs 3 per day as compensation,” said telecom industry bodies COAI and AUSPI in a joint letter to Trai. To recover this cost of compensation, the letter said telecom operators will have to increase tariffs leading to customer spending more to purchase telecom services.
“The present licensing regime will treat these spending as a part of their (telecom operators) gross revenue (GR) and will impose taxes/regulatory levies to the tune of 25-30 per cent.
This phenomenon will lead to losses like eddy currents and make the telecom services costlier to the customers. This burden will directly be proportional to the number of customer using the call drop to earn compensation,” said the industry bodies.
Trai has mandated operators to compensate consumers from January 1 if they face call drop problem. However, the regulation limits compensation to only three call drops in a day.
Telecom operators claimed that the annual industry compensation due to dropped calls may range from Rs 10,000 crores in case 10 per cent of subscribers claim compensation to Rs 54,000 crores in case 50 per cent of subscribers claim it. “Moreover, even if the call drop rate is 1 per cent, operators will still be required to provide compensation to the tune of Rs 1,083 crore,” said the operators.
