Call drops, spams came down: TRAI
By Sanjay Singh
New Delhi, September 3: As a mobile user, you may still be facing call drops, unsolicited spam messages and calls (calls by marketing agents), but the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) believes that the standard of service (QoS) supplied by telecom operators namely Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance Jio and state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) has improved and the difficulty of unsolicited industrial communication (UCC) has also come down during the last couple of years.
TRAI Secretary V Raghunandan told a leading news daily that telecom companies including BSNL are performing significantly well as far as various parameters pertaining to call quality such as network congestion and call drops, are concerned.
The TRAI Secretary also stated that an extensive mechanism for monitoring the quality of calls and that it monitored every licensed service area (LSA) over broadband, fixed line and mobile services. “If a fault repeats in any LSA, then we have a slab-wise increase in penalty with a cumulative levy option,” he stated.
According to TRAI, unsolicited commercial communication (UCC) have reduced significantly as the telecom watchdog has been receiving far less complaints in the past couple of years. The complaints that the government body has been receiving are expected to go down further as the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) introduces caller-ID based verification in India.
For the unversed, TRAI, earlier this year, started a consultation for framing a mechanism that will lead to KYC (Know Your Customer)-based caller names to appear on phones in India whenever a call is made. In addition to showing KYC-based names, this mechanism would also enable users in identifying spam calls and calls from telemarketing companies
TRAI says the mechanism will enable name-appearing on a phone screen, in accordance with KYC done by telecom companies, as per DoT norms.
In addition to this, the TRAI official also said that the organisation was supervising roadside driving tests conducted by various telecom operators in multiple cities in the country to constantly monitor the quality of calls in the country. TRAI levies fines on the telecom companies who evade on addressing quality of calls.
Despite government’s claims, India continues to battle with spam calls and messages over phones, even as India’s is readying towards developing 5G ecosystem, which is all set to change the way people communicate over phone.
India has moved from 9th position to the 4th in a list of countries that received the most number of spam calls, according to a new report by caller-identification application Truecaller.
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