The chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) R S Sharma on Sunday pulled up telecom service providers for pointing to free calls as a reason for poor service quality. Speaking at an event in Pune, Sharma assured customers that call drops remained an important item on the regulator’s agenda and said that such excuses from telcos will not pass regulatory muster.
“Most of the telcos are offering voice free, their argument is that if something is free, how much can you (Trai) punish them because they are not getting anything for that, which may not be correct because they are essentially cross-subsidising,” Sharma said at the Asia Economic Dialogue summit.
He made the comments in the wake of reports of rising call drops.
The telecom sector has been in the throes of severe financial distress since the entry of Reliance Jio in 2016 forced incumbents to match the tariffs offered by the Reliance group unit.
Voice calling on most major networks is effectively free now, affecting incumbents’ revenue streams and impacting new infra-structure creation.
However, any operator found to be giving poor service will be punished, Sharma assured.
The TRAI chief also urged citizens to help the growth of communications by coming forward to allow construction of telecom towers on their property.
Such towers pose no health hazards, he said, calling for more extensive last-mile telecom infrastructure to be erected to ensure people get faster connectivity in high-rises.
On soon-to-be rolled out 5G networks, Sharma said this would need significant investment in infrastructure building.
He also stressed that the laying of optical fibre cables were a crucial task since India is heavily dependent on wireless data transfer currently and there was a need for more wired data transfer channels.