Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel offer premium plans RedX and Platinum respectively. These plans offer 'priority 4G network' and unlimited data access. The TRAI, in early July, sent a notice to both the telecom giants to block these plans with immediate effect. Vodafone has appealed to Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal or TDSAT against it.

TRAI's order came after a complaint by the market leader Reliance Jio that claimed that providing better services to one set of customers would 'undoubtedly deteriorate service quality to another set of customers'.

While TDSAT has stayed TRAI's order, we explore why TRAI had a problem in the first place and why telcos were not on board.

Which are the premium plans in contention?

In November 2019, Vodafone Idea launched its RedX plan for Rs 1099 a month. While several benefits are offered under this plan, one of them includes (as per the company) 50 percent faster data speeds for postpaid customers. Airtel earlier this year launched its 'Platinum' plan. This plan entails Rs 499 per month for postpaid customers and offers faster 4G speeds and 'priority preference'.

Why the TRAI is against premium plans?

There are two parts to TRAI's argument. Disruption of service and leading advertisement of faster speed

1) The regulator believes that customers cannot get 'priority access' without deteriorating the quality of service of other customers. So, if the operators were offering faster speeds and priority access to the network, it believes, it would have to be at the customers who are paying lesser and that would lead to a mismatch in the quality of service. TRAI has asked the telecom operators to explain how faster speed and priority access can be guaranteed without disruption of service

2) TRAI also argues that on earlier occasions, telecom operators have said that faster speed cannot be provided. It also says that in mobile networks the capacity of any base station is shared by thousands or hundreds of subscribers as mobile networks work on shared infrastructure with a fixed capacity. Over here TRAI argues that a metric used to measure actual demand to bandwidth comes into focus.

For instance, if a tower with a capacity of 100 megabits per second has 10 users connected to it at one point, its contention ratio will be 10:1. This means that each user will get data speeds of 10 megabits per second. But if 40 more users join, the ratio increased to 50:1 and the speed per user gets degraded t 2 megabits per second.

Simply put, the speed of a user's network depends on many factors including how many people are connected to a particular tower, what the network capacity is of their handheld device, etc, factors that the operator cannot guarantee, says TRAI.

What are the telecom operators saying?

Telecom operators have been (in words of a few officials we spoke to) 'dumbfounded' on the issue. They say that they have applied 'advanced technologies' to help the premium customers get better service and faster speeds but this will not impact other customers that have paid for lesser plans.

In addition, telecom operators say that they need flexibility on tariff plans. They have been asking for floor tariffs from the government for a long time but no movement has been seen despite the consultation paper on floor prices being released. If floor pricing is not fixed, they need flexibility over fixing their tariff plans for maintaining ARPUS which will ensure service delivery.

First Published:Jul 21, 2020 5:36 PM IST