Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) plans on recommending stricter norms for internal sim car and calling card companies. According to a PTI report, it will also ask them to refund to customers in case of service failure during an overseas travel.
If the Telecom Department accepts TRAI’s recommendations, companies will have to refund and compensate customers if their calling card don’t work abroad. However, the extent of compensation is not known yet.
This comes after TRAI’s discussions with international sim car and global calling card companies earlier this year, the report states.
An SMs-based survey, conducted by TRAI, earlier revealed that nearly half the consumers who used such services claimed it worked partially or did not work at all. “TRAI will be recommending tighter checks on these companies, including a monitoring mechanism on how much business are they doing, how many cards are they selling,” a person familiar with the matter told PTI.
TRAI is also looking at a 24-hour call centre support and other technical ways of establishing the veracity of customers claim that a particular really did not work.
In the survey conducted a few months back, the regulator asked consumers whether their international SIM cards worked when they were abroad. Close to 50% respondents claimed that their cards worked. Of the rest, nearly 30% said it did not work at all, while 20% said it only worked partially.
PTI reports that these instances of unsatisfactory service quality had prompted the regulator to call for a meeting with the companies and seek an explanation from them in March this year.
TRAI met eight to nine players and asked them to explain the reason for the poor service. TRAI asked for specific reasons for the failure of service, and if the glitches has anything to do with the SIM cards or if it was a connectivity issue at the level of the local country operator. It also asked them if it could be because the customer did not follow proper procedure for dialling.
A few operators who were part of that TRAI meeting then included Matrix, Uniconnect and Oneworld Teleservices.