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The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has proposed penalties for telecom service providers that fail to conform to a prescribed quality of service.

In a consultation paper on quality of service, the regulator has proposed short-term and long-term targets for the service providers. These, it hopes, will open telecom operations to review and help in upgrading and improving existing quality in a phased manner.

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For providing a new wireline telephone connections, the TRAI has proposed a benchmark of two weeks as the maximum waiting period.

The short-term target to achieve this is one week and in the long run the waiting period will be reduced to three days.

In case of the failure of the service providers to do so, the regulator has proposed imposition of penalty at a fixed rate. The exact amount will be decided through a consultation process.

Similarly, for a wireless connection, TRAI has proposed a benchmark of three days. Here the short-term and long-term targets would be of two days and 24 hours respectively.

TRAI Chairman Justice S S Sodhi says the present quality of service standards is far below international standards. TRAI has identified the indicators for quality of service with regard to both service management and network performance aspects.

For local call completion ratio the proposed benchmark is 65 per cent in the long term. The call completion ratio for STD and ISD has been fixed at the same level.

The regulator has also asked the service providers to bring down the complaints to six in a month per 100 reported complaints in the long term and 12 in the short term. Wireline and wireless faults have been proposed to be brought down to 4 and 2 per 100 subscriber.

The regulator has also proposed to bring down the fault rates to 1 per cent for payphones and 2 per cent for local leased circuits.

Withdrawal and provision of additional facilities such as phone plus services, STD, accessories and other commercial activities have to be completed within two days in the long term and three days in the short-term.

However, the toughest proposals are related to the billing performance of the service providers.

The regulator has proposed that in the long term the service providers have to ensure that 97 per cent of the complaints in this regard are resolved within 30 days.

Services have to be restored within three days of the payment and the maximum time for refunding the money would be a month.

- Compiled from the Indian media

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