Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), justifying its decision to impose penalty on telecom companies has said to the Supreme Court that the firms were not upgrading infrastructure to ensure disruption-free calling and accused them of running a cartel with scant care for customers facing the problem of call drops.
Defending the decision to charge telcos for call drops, the telecom body alleged that a cartel of four-to-five operators are having a billion subscribers and are raking in Rs 250 crore a day but not investing in their networks to check the problem. It pointed that there was a 61-per cent increase in consumers last five years and 41 per cent increase in revenue.
Appearing for Trai before a bench of Justice Kurian Joseph and Justice R F Nariman, Attorney General (AG) Mukul Rohatgi said around 800 crore outgoing calls drop in a year, most of them because of the fault of telecom service providers which generated revenue of about 1.4 lakh crore in 2014-15. He further said that consumers must get decent service. Various technologies are evolving. If you are ready to invest, the problems can be solved. Like in the western world, there are no towers. For an orderly world, you must invest.
AG further defended the penalty imposed by the regulator on telecom firms saying it will be around Rs 280 crore and not thousands of crore as was being claimed by the service providers. He also said that the companies force consumers to sign on documents at the time of getting connection, which say that the operator would not be responsible for call drops, how would a poor consumer know what is there in the documents.
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