Telecom regulator TRAI said that operators will be liable to pay up to Rs 5 lakh in fines if they fail to meet TRAI’s new call drop benchmark, in a new amendment (pdf). In case the operator defaults in meeting the benchmarks for two quarters consecutively, the fine amount will be increased by 1.5x times, and 2x times for more than 2 quarters, the regulator added. Note that these regulations will come into force on October 1st, 2017. The earlier method of calculating call drops—using performance data from 22 service areas on an average basis—is now discarded. TRAI said that the average data “in effect hides the poorly performing cells or BTS (Base Transceiver Station).” Since there was no granular measurement at the cell level, it seemed like telcos were meeting quality of standards regulations, but “customers were complaining about poor QoS” in several service areas, TRAI added. The revised call drop benchmark—Dropped Call Rate (DCR) will be calculated on a percentile basis instead of existing methodology which calculates only the average of all call drops in a service area. It will include performance measures at a cell or BTS level, instead of service area level. Mobile carrier cells sometimes face downtime issues either temporarily or for several days, and this might not reflect on TRAI’s test reports. The new metric will also “help to highlight the specific areas and specific days when network performance was excellent or poor,” TRAI added. Other changes to QoS benchmarks Dropped Call Rate (DCR)…
