Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea can get relief from DoT on penalties

The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is likely to eventually reject the recommendation of the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) to impose a cumulative penalty of Rs 3,050 crore on Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea for failing to provide interconnection points to Reliance Jio. in 2016 when it had started operations.

Officials told FE that the opinion has gained acceptance that the time is not conducive to burdening operators with a financial penalty as they are financially stretched and have to pay their adjusted gross revenue installments. Furthermore, since the government has announced that the next round of auctions will take place in March, it does not want to take any action that would upset the operators and that could prevent them from participating in the auctions. Since a new president has taken over Trai, there is also a feeling that the regulator will not feel slighted and the problem can be safely buried.

Although at Trai’s insistence, the Digital Communications Commission (DCC), the highest decision-making body of the telecommunications department, had approved the sanction in July last year, the matter has not yet been approved by the telecommunications minister . Ravi Shankar Prasad. The DoT also believes that if the lawsuit notices are filed, Bharti and Vodafone Idea will surely challenge it in the Telecom Dispute Settlement and Appeals Tribunal (TDSAT), and the government is unwilling at this stage to become entangled in another legal fight. .

Officials said DCC had done everything it could to fix the matter by asking Trai to review the amount as the sector was under financial stress, but the regulator unfortunately stood firm. In fact, before the matter was sent to Trai for review, an internal seven-member DoT committee had rejected the regulator’s recommendation to impose the sanction 4: 3 and left the final decision to the DCC.

Certainly, even a year ago, the DCC could have ignored Trai’s recommendation and went ahead with removing the fine or reducing the amount. This is because Trai has no powers to impose fines. Suo motu issued the recommendation to the DoT based on a complaint from Reliance Jio. As a licensor, the power to impose fines or cancel licenses rests with the DCC, which can request recommendations from Trai, but in this case it was not.

In October 2016, Trai recommended that a fine of Rs 50 crore be imposed on Bharti Airtel and Vodafone each in 21 circles, while a similar amount be imposed on Idea Cellular in 19 circles. Therefore, the penalty for Bharti and Vodafone was Rs 1,050 each, while for Idea it was Rs 950 crore. In August 2018, Vodafone and Idea merged and were christened Vodafone Idea.

Trai recommended fines after issuing show-of-cause notices to all three operators towards the end of September 2016 after finding a high level of congestion on their networks, leading to failures in calls made to and from the Jio network beyond. of the allowed limits.

The three incumbent companies in their defense had stated that there is a period of 90 days from the commercial launch of the services by an operator to provide the required interconnection points and they met this deadline. They said it was unfair of Trai to monitor congestion levels on a daily basis and recommend a fine. Ideally, you should have measured congestion on a monthly basis, where the results would have been different.

Quality of service standards prescribe that the level of congestion should not exceed 0.5%, which means that out of 1,000 calls, no more than five should fail. The level of congestion is different from that of call drop. In the former, a call does not connect, while in the latter, a call drops after it connects. For drop calls, the failure should not be greater than 2%.

The regulator does not have the power to impose sanctions on operators who do not comply with its directive. The most you can do is file the charges in civil court.