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Trai regulation on call drops arbitrary, unreasonable: Supreme Court

"We have held the impugned regulation to be ultra vires, arbitrary, unreasonable and non-transparent," a bench headed by Justice Kurian Joseph said while setting aside the Trai order.

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Ruling that the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) regulation on call drops is "arbitrary and unreasonable and non-transparent," the Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down the Commission's regulation making it mandatory for telecom companies to compensate subscribers for call drops.

"We have held the impugned regulation to be ultra vires, arbitrary, unreasonable and non-transparent," a bench headed by Justice Kurian Joseph said while setting aside the Trai order.

The detailed judgment is yet to be made public.

In October last year, Trai in a notification had asked the telecom firms to compensate each consumer with Re 1 for each call drop subject to maximum of three disrupted calls in a day from January this year.

On March 1 this year, the Delhi High Court has upheld the same against which the Cellular Operators' Association of India, a body of Unified Telecom Service Providers of India and 21 telecom operators, including Vodafone, Bharti Airtel and Reliance, approached the Supreme Court.

The telecom companies had argued that the entire sector is under huge debt and they have to pay big price for spectrum, therefore zero tolerance on call drops should not be imposed on them.

Refuting the allegations of Trai that the telecom service providers are taking huge gains in the sector, the firms had said they have been investing hugely on the infrastructure.

The regulatory authority had told the court that its regulation was to protect the interest of consumers as these service providers are not willing to compensate them.

To safeguard 100 crore telecom subscribers, the regulator said if companies agree to compensate call drops with equal number of free calls to consumers without pre-conditions then it is open to re- consider its direction imposing penalty on them.

It said a "cartel" of 4-5 telecom firms having a billion subscribers are making Rs 250 crore a day but not making investments on their network to improve services to check call drops.

The counsel for telecom operators had refuted the allegations of Trai that telecom companies are not investing on technology and towers and had said that in past 15 months over two lakh towers have been installed.

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