The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has released a draft called the "Telecom Consumers Protection (Eighth Amendment) Regulations, 2015" where it has proposed that telcos provide data usage info, alerts on usage of 50, 90 and 100 percent usage and explicit customer consent for activating and deactivating data services. The TRAI states in its paper (pdf) that it has been receiving several complaints from customers with regard to non availability of information with respect to the data usage in a data session. Since the tariff for data when the a data pack expires (data usage is charged through talktime balance) is higher (for example 3paisa/kb), customers are unaware of their data pack expiry and hence end up shelling a lot more money than they had planned to use initially. It adds that since sometimes, activation of internet services is done without their consent, they end up incurring bills of large amounts. The complaints also included GPRS getting activated on feature phones without their users' consent. It said that for these, too, explicit consumer consent was necessary in order to activate or deactivate data services. To fix this, it has proposed the above measures for service providers to inform its customers via SMS or USSD when data services are activated via special tariff vouchers, combo vouchers or add on packs, when a 5GB limit has been reached. It also added that post the expiry of the data pack, telcos should inform the users about the tariffs applicable and send an…
