The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has published its performance indicator report for the three months ended 30 September 2015, confirming its earlier claims that the instance of call dropping was increasing in certain areas. According to the report, operators failed to meet the overall call drop benchmark of 2% in four circles compared to three in June 2015, and 29.51% of the affected cells reported drop rates of worse than 3%, up from 24.59% three months earlier, and 12.50% in March 2015.
As previously reported by TeleGeography’s CommsUpdate, in October 2015 the TRAI introduced new rules obliging cellcos to automatically compensate users at a rate of INR1 (USD0.015) per dropped call, to a maximum of INR3 per customer per day. The rules came into effect from 1 January 2016 but have faced legal opposition from the nation’s cellcos, which claim the rules could cost the industry INR540 billion per year. In addition to compensating consumers for poor quality of service (QoS) the new rules were also intended to encourage operators to invest in improving infrastructure to meet the demands of their growing subscriber bases.