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NEW DELHI, March 5

THE Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has decided to act tough against the cellular and basic service operators whose quality of service (QoS) to the customers is lower than the benchmarked standards.

Announcing this while releasing the third quarterly survey to assess the QoS provided by service providers across the country, Mr M.S. Verma, Chairman, TRAI, noted that the operators who continued to deliver poor quality services in consecutive surveys would be penalised to begin with. They had also been asked to compensate the customers.

Along with this, a strong letter of disapproval would be sent to the licensor - the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and the issue of continuation of licence would be looked at.

``Till now, we were making the shortcomings public and trying to persuade the operators to improve QoS, but now there will have to be other action, as it tantamounts to violation of TRAI's regulation on QoS,'' he said.

Mr Verma noted that the results of the survey showed that some of the operators had started pulling up their socks. However, there was not much change in various subjective parameters of customer satisfaction compared to the previous surveys.

A vast majority of the basic and cellular operators are still not able to meet the QoS norms as laid down in the regulations. Some of the cellular operators are also found to be adopting wrong methods for calculation and reporting of the norms.

"In the case of basic services, the findings from the three consecutive surveys are not very encouraging. None of the operators is found to be meeting the important benchmark in respect of providing new connections soon after registration of demand. Though the private operators are meeting some of the benchmarks, they are not entirely comparable with the incumbent operator, owing to disparity in size and scope of operations, as well as the fact that they are mostly operating in urban areas", he noted.

Mr Verma said that the benchmarks pertaining to call completion rate and grade of service were the ones which the operators needed to focus on.

Customer care promptness also remained an area of concern, with virtually no operator being able to comply with the prescribed benchmarks. A lot of billing related grievances got overlooked as under the current system, the incumbent operator only records written complaints.

"In the case of cellular mobile telephones, the operators have been able to meet the benchmark for fault incidence whereas it seems that they need to speed up to achieve the clearance of fault complaints within 24 hours of receiving the same. Billing systems and customer awareness of QoS norms also remain as areas which need improvement", he said.

Network performance, reliability and availability are the single most impacting parameter from the subscriber's point of view. The second most important parameter is billing services. Maintainability and help services are also important for basic service subscribers, although they are less important for cellular subscribers. Similarly, supplementary services are important for cellular subscribers while they are not so for basic subscribers.

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