Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has amended the Quality of Service guidelines for Broadband service making it mandatory for service providers to meet prescribed norms. If an operator fails to meet the benchmark once, it will have to pay a fine of up to Rs 50,000 and subsequent violations will attract penalty of up to Rs 100,000.
According to the new regulation, which will come into force from 1st January 2013, provision or activation of data services is to be done within four hours of receiving the request.
Also, minimum speed of each plan has to be measured and reported to TRAI. The best part is that TRAI has asked operators to ensure 75 per cent subscribed speed is actually received by the subscriber. So, if the operator promises 7.2 Mbps download speed then they have to ensure atleast 5.4 Mbps or above. Data drop rate also has to be below 5 per cent.
To improve transparency, all the operators have been asked to publish, on their websites, the details of all data services offered, along with their tariff, clearly indicating the cities and towns where such data services and tariff plans are applicable.
The new regulations also bars operators from offering new data services or modify the existing data services or tariff without prior publication on their websites.