The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has asked all telecom operators to submit a report on the action they’re taking to deal with call drops by 31 July, reports NDTV. TRAI’s letter to the telecom companies stated that it was necessary for service providers to ‘undertake a special drive for radio frequency optimisation, analyse the reason of call drops and take appropriate steps’. The TRAI benchmark allows a call drop rate of less than 2%. Dropped call reimbursement: Last month, the Department of Telecom suggested to TRAI that telecom operators could provide free minutes in talk time to consumers whose calls drop. The DoT also said that it had asked TRAI to build a ‘disincentive’ mechanism in order to reduce the number of call drops that consumers face. In case telcos did not adhere to TRAI’s service quality benchmark, they should be levied with a penalty, the department added. TRAI tested through its monitoring devices: In April, TRAI was working on a set of service quality benchmarks which included call drops, billing, complaint redressal time and time taken to attend customer calls, in order to take stricter action against telcos who did not follow it. TRAI had carried out a 3 month pilot to test call drops and got new devices which would monitor call drops across all telcos in the country. Top call drop complaints against Airtel: In the same breath, Airtel became the number one operator whose call drop complaints (31) flooded the TRAI this year (up to 30…
