What TRAI's Draft Asks Of Telcos And Why BSNL Objects

Telecom users may be able to check likely signal quality before picking a plan, claim a rebate after a long outage and get billing disputes settled within a week, if changes proposed by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) go through. State-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) says delivering this carries a cost it is not resourced to bear.

In its response to the proposals, BSNL said tighter compliance requirements and higher financial disincentives could add to pressures it already faces. That, it said, would make it harder to meet public-service obligations, expand connectivity in rural and hard-to-reach areas and continue its 4G rollout.

What TRAI Wants Telcos To Deliver

In August, TRAI proposed amendments to the Standards of Quality of Service of Access (Wireline and Wireless) and Broadband (Wireline and Wireless) Service Regulations, 2024. Operators would have to publish more accurate coverage maps online, so users can gauge the expected signal in their area before choosing a plan. Billing disputes would have to be settled in seven days, against four weeks now. Silent calls, where a connection stays live but the audio drops, would face tighter limits.

A customer hit by an outage lasting more than 24 hours would be entitled to a bill rebate or extra validity on a prepaid plan. TRAI has also proposed a single Quality of Experience score, drawn from network performance, call quality and customer service, to help users compare operators.

On enforcement, penalties would rise for inaccurate compliance reports and other violations, going up to ₹10 lakh for repeated breaches. For 5G, operators would have to track network capacity more closely and inform TRAI at least 21 days before creating new network slices, which are virtual networks configured for specific uses.

Why BSNL Calls The Bill Too High

BSNL told TRAI that every added obligation and more detailed reporting needs dedicated capital and recurring spending on systems to measure, monitor and report. "BSNL is presently not resourced to absorb this extra expenditure without harming the capex earmarked for network rollout and service improvement in commercially challenging areas," it said.

The operator cited its public-service role and its presence in remote, non-remunerative terrain where private players often do not deploy services. It said uniform commercial benchmarks, including the proposed experience score, would be unfair and inaccurate for such a network. The seven-day deadline for billing and charging complaints was among its main concerns.

BSNL also asked TRAI to leave out outages caused by third-party damage, power failures, floods, fires and other disasters when assessing compliance and deciding penalties. It flagged the risk of stacked penalties as well. A single fibre cut, it said, could draw an outage penalty, a reporting-mismatch penalty and a late-reporting penalty. It proposed a "one root cause, single disincentive" approach. It also objected to treating a gap of more than 1% between reported figures and TRAI's calculations as false reporting, saying manual or system errors can explain such differences.

At an open house discussion on September 30, BSNL argued that calling the penalties "financial disincentives" does not alter their "substantive character" as monetary punishment. It said that if fines improved service, the countries imposing the heaviest ones would have the best networks, and that each rupee paid as a penalty is a rupee pulled out of infrastructure investment.

Private Operators Question The Maths

Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea have opposed several proposals as technically difficult and operationally impractical. They said coverage maps rest on computer models and cannot always match actual signal, which shifts with weather, buildings, hills and trees. A 98% accuracy requirement would therefore be hard to meet, they said.

On silent calls, the operators said some audio pauses are intentional and help networks save battery and manage capacity. Perceived muting can also originate in handsets, faulty microphones, app processing or interconnecting networks, and not the operator's radio network, they said, adding that treating all of it as a network fault could skew results. On 5G slicing, they said 80% cell utilisation limits could restrict traffic management, limit network flexibility, hinder innovation and affect ease of doing business.

TRAI imposed financial disincentives of nearly ₹1.88 crore on four operators for violating quality of service norms in FY26, against ₹19 lakh in FY25, according to calculations based on the regulator's website. BSNL's penalties were the highest at ₹89.5 lakh in FY26. Operators often challenge Trai's penalties before the appellate tribunal.