India’s telecom regulator has proposed one of its most consumer-focused reforms in years, unveiling draft amendments that would require mobile and broadband operators to compensate subscribers for extended service outages while simultaneously tightening rules on silent calls and clearing the way for differentiated 4G and 5G pricing. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s draft amendment to the Standards of Quality of Service Regulations, 2024 marks the first substantial revision to the framework since it was consolidated less than two years ago, and reflects a regulator responding directly to how central mobile connectivity has become to banking, healthcare and everyday economic life.
Defining an Outage and What Operators Will Owe
At the heart of the draft is a new compensation mechanism triggered by what TRAI defines as a major network outage, a situation where mobile or broadband service remains unavailable across an entire district for more than four consecutive hours. Should that disruption stretch beyond 24 hours, telecom providers would be required to compensate every affected subscriber under a standardised framework.
The compensation itself is structured to reflect how customers actually pay for service. Postpaid subscribers would receive a rental waiver equivalent to the number of days their service remained down, automatically adjusted in their next monthly bill, while prepaid subscribers would get their plan validity extended by the same number of disrupted days, ensuring they are not effectively charged for service they never received. TRAI has framed this as an accountability measure intended to push operators toward greater investment in network resilience rather than treating outages as an unavoidable cost of doing business.
Cracking Down on Silent Calls and Tightening Reporting Standards
The draft also targets a subtler but widespread irritant for mobile users, the silent call, defined in the proposed rules as any connected call where no voice is heard for four seconds or longer. Often linked to automated dialling systems and network quality issues, such calls have become common enough that TRAI now wants operators held to a hard benchmark of one percent or fewer such incidents, with financial penalties for any operator failing to meet that standard on a quarterly basis.
Enforcement teeth extend well beyond silent calls. The draft significantly raises penalties for operators that submit false compliance reports, proposing fines of up to ₹2 lakh per benchmark for a first violation, rising to ₹5 lakh for repeat violations and as much as ₹10 lakh for further offences, alongside separate penalties of up to ₹10 lakh for delayed submissions or continued regulatory non-compliance. Operators will also be required to maintain at least 98 percent accuracy in the geospatial coverage maps they publish, validated through physical or virtual drive tests in areas where consumers have reported persistent poor coverage, and TRAI plans to begin publishing service-wise Quality of Experience Scores that combine network performance, customer service and consumer feedback into a single comparative metric for subscribers.
Network Slicing and the Coming Debate Over Differentiated Pricing
Perhaps the most commercially consequential proposal in the draft concerns network slicing, a 5G capability that lets operators carve out dedicated portions of network capacity for specific services or user tiers. TRAI’s draft would formally bring slicing into the QoS framework, requiring operators to submit detailed technical parameters for any new slice at least 21 days before launch, with each slice offering treated as a distinct tariff category carrying its own quality benchmarks.
The move effectively endorses the direction Bharti Airtel has already taken with its Fast Lane offering for postpaid users, even as rivals Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea have previously resisted network slicing, arguing it risks discriminating between subscribers based on what they can afford to pay for guaranteed performance. That underlying tension, between allowing operators to monetise premium network experiences and preserving a level playing field for ordinary subscribers, is likely to surface prominently once the consultation period opens to industry feedback.
TRAI has invited written comments from telecom companies, industry associations, consumer groups and the public by August 26, 2026, with counter-comments accepted until September 7, 2026. The regulator has indicated the amended framework could take effect from October 1, 2026, pending the outcome of that consultation process, giving stakeholders roughly three weeks to weigh in before the window narrows on what could become one of the more significant recalibrations of consumer protection in India’s telecom sector in recent years.
