New Delhi: India’s largest telecom operator Bharti Airtel on Thursday upped the ante on the call drop issue saying that it will follow a 25 per cent more stringent norm than mandate by Trai and will pay a maximum of Rs 100 crore towards charity if the voluntarily set benchmark was breached.
Airtel’s announcement comes a day after the Supreme Court struck down Trai’s regulation that telecom operators will pay customers Rs 1 per dropped call and a maximum of Rs 3 a day.
While Trai quality of service benchmark mandates that call drops should be below two per cent, Airtel announced to voluntary follow benchmark of 1.5 per cent.
Airtel will contribute towards rural education Rs 1 lakh for every 0.01 per cent increase in call drop rate beyond 1.5 per cent every month in each circle of operation, subject to a maximum of Rs 100 crore per annum. It will report its Quality of Service (QoS) data and the amount calculated on a quarterly/annual basis to ensure transparency.
“Based on the calculation of the call drop rate during network busy hour on a monthly average, any amount calculated for exceeding the 1.5 per cent voluntary benchmark, subject to a maximum of '100 crores per annum, will be contributed by Airtel towards the education of underprivileged children in rural areas,” said the company.
Airtel said that it has decided to apply this standard benchmark across the country despite the constraint of difficult operating conditions in some areas, in particular hilly regions such as Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and North East. As per Trai’s test drive in January in Delhi Airtel 2G call drop rate was 1.41 per cent and Airtel 3G 1.58 per cent.
“This self-regulation on Quality of Service further underlines our commitment to our customers despite the challenges of limited spectrum availability and acquisition of sites in urban areas,” said Gopal Vittal, MD and CEO (India and South Asia), Bharti Airtel.
He said that Airtel has already rolled out Project Leap, under which the company transparently report its site deployments and invite customers to log their network issues and site requirements.
“During FY16, Airtel invested over Rs 15,000 crores towards deployment of over 88,000 sites. This is the largest network deployment anywhere in the world outside of China and reinforces our sharp focus on building a future ready network.” Mr Vittal added.
