Telecom India: TRAI has finally taken a better decision to punish erring telecom operators who are not meeting QoS (Quality of Services) norms.
Ideally, TRAI should have imposed Rs 10000000 as penalty per complaint. TRAI also should not allow telecom operators to take customers to take court. Courting court has become a regular practice for telecom operators. Instead of spending funds on networks, these mobile players allocate huge funds on court cases.
Why cannot TRAI penalize senior officials with telecom operators who are not addressing QoS issues? Let mobile operators come out with a list of senior professionals who are running the show.
TRAI should also include managed services providers such as Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens Networks, Huawei, ZTE, etc. in the list of companies who are responsible for meeting quality norms. If these companies are included, telecom players like Airtel or Vodafone will put stringent SLA conditions on these network providers.
Currently, there is less transparency on broadband speed or quality of voice services offered by Indian mobile service providers.
Operators are running their services without much inspection or supervision from the sector regulator.
Several operators do not even respond to customer queries. Their IVR system does not have offer right inputs to customer queries if they have network problems.
This journalist has complained to his telecom operator 2-3 times. The operator does not even want to register the complaint. In the past 2-3 month, I am facing poor quality calls. Some time ago, I already decided to junk 3G services since this journalist could not access mobile internet in hotels like in Le Meridien or Lalit in Delhi.
TRAI says telecom operators will now be penalized for providing poor quality of service and could attract fines of up to Rs 10 lakh for incorrect information on every performance parameter. Rs 10 lakh is a small amount for telecom operators that make billions of rupees as investment for promotions.
Can Indian mobile users think that an operator like Reliance Communications has spent less than Rs 500 crore as Capex (Capital expenditure) during the second quarter? American telecom giant AT&T is going to spend more than $20 billion each year in the next three years.
Portugal Telecom says much of its Capex will be on improving customer experience. I suggest Indian telecom operators to spend funds on network quality. Let us enjoy Diwali with better voice and data quality and proper 3G network. Operators should celebrate after achieving QoS norms.
Baburajan K
[email protected]
