Ever since Reliance Jio’s entry has disrupted the telecom space in India, incumbents Airtel, Vodafone and Idea have been struggling to hold their market share. At a time like this, the latest report of TRAI states that users of Airtel, Vodafone and Idea filed the maximum billing complaints in October-December of 2016.
As reported by Firstpost, the complaints in the case of Bharti Airtel mostly came from 2G pre-paid subscribers in Tamil Nadu (including Chennai), Kolkata, Haryana and Jammu and Kashmir, where the benchmark violation ranged between 0.11% and 0.12%.
The report says that as per quality of service norms, the complaint level should not be more than 0.1% per 100 bills issued in one quarter. The maximum violations have been found in the case of Vodafone, where 0.15% of bills were disputed by its users in Andhra Pradesh while 0.13% of bills in Karnataka were disputed.
In Mumbai circle, Vodafone is the only operator whose post-paid customers raised several quality issues in the October-December quarter of 2016.
In the North East, 0.13% of disputed bills were against Idea.
In terms of call drops, TRAI report finds that Aircel’s performance was below par in most circles. A penalty of Ra 2 lakh has been set by TRAI for poor mobile service, which kicks in for over 2% call drops in a quarter in one telecom circle.
Aircel’s 2G network crossed this limit in four circles. The call drop rate on the Aircel network was as high as 27.73 in the north-east circle. Other operators such as Airtel, Sistema Shyam and Reliance Communications (GSM) service also overshot the call drop level in one circle each.
During the peak hour, the rate is relaxed up to 3%. However, even in peak hours, Aircel 2G’s figures remained above this level in 11 out of the 22 circles. Vodafone, BSNL and Tata Teleservices (CDMA) also had over 3% call drops during peak hours in one circle each.
According to the report, Telenor, which is being acquired by Airtel performed poorly in Bihar and UP East circle.
In the deposits refund category, Rcom topped the list of offenders followed by Tata Teleservices. TRAI rules state that a telecom operator should refund 100% of the claimed deposit within 60 days. But this was breached by Rcom in at least 20 circles across India and by TTSL in six circles, the report states.
Image: Victogrigas