Almost 80 per cent of the pesky calls in the last two years originated in networks of Aircel, Tata Teleservices and Reliance Communications, a government official said today.
As per the data compiled by government agencies for the period between September 27, 2011 and August 21, 2013, customers made 627,384 complaints against pesky calls.
“These three (TTSL, RCom, Aircel) accounted for almost 80 per cent of the total (telephone) numbers against whom complaints were lodged for making UCC (Unsolicited Commercial Communications) in the last two years,” the official said.
The data show over 2,45,700 complaints were made against numbers of Tata Teleservices (TTSL) network. Over 1,78,000 were against RCom numbers, while over 57,000 grievances were lodged against numbers belonging to Aircel network.
Responding to an e-mail query, TTSL said that it noticed issues specifically in two service areas where some of the tariff plans were being misused to send unsolicited commercial communications.
“We have since disconnected the errant customers, amended the tariff schemes and plans that we had in the market to eliminate possible loopholes that could be exploited and taken appropriate action against the channel partners all of which had contributed to the UCC problem,” a TTSL spokesperson said.
The spokesperson added that to curb misuse of its network, the company is among the first operators to nationally deploy a technology—driven solution that checks words used in SMS and act against it.
“The complaint levels have come down considerably following these actions,” the spokesperson said.
Reliance Communications (Rcom) and Aircel did not reply to queries sent in this regard.
Vodafone and Airtel come next in the list with over 52,000 and 40,000 complaints received against numbers on their networks.
Over 20,000 pesky calls and SMSes originated from Sistema Shyam Teleservices network, 16,667 from Idea Cellular, 6,338 against Uninor, 3,768 BSNL, 2,889 Loop Mobiles, 2,048 MTNL, 1,527 Videocon and 486 from Quadrant Televentures during the period.
None of these operators responded to queries sent to them in this regard.
To curb the menace of pesky calls and SMSes, telecom regulator TRAI had come out with stringent norms where it has decided to disconnect phone connections of entity referred in the pesky SMS and levy fine of Rs 5,000 per message on telecom company from whose network the message originates.