TRAI has now made mandatory for Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea and others to offer ring time of 30 seconds as standard for all outgoing and incoming calls.
Recently, we have seen much debate among the telecom industry for IUC (Interconnect Usage Charge), while Mukesh Ambani owned telco Reliance Jio has started charging its customer for making outgoing voice calls to other networks. While the resolution on this issue is yet to be seen, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has taken a decision on the earlier disputed issue of call ring time. The call ring rime for all operators is now set to 30 seconds for Mobile and 60 seconds for Landline.
According to the latest press release from TRAI, all the telecom operators are now will be offering 30 seconds of ringing time for all outgoing and incoming calls. This call ring time will be for 30 seconds regardless of whether the call has not been answered or rejected, and the operator who originated the call has to release the unanswered call after 90 seconds if the receiving operator doesn’t deliver the call release message.
TRAI has mentioned –
Access Provide would have to maintain the time duration of alert for an incoming voice call, which is neither answered nor rejected by the called party, to thirty seconds for Cellular Mobile Telephone Service and sixty seconds for Basic Telephone Service. The terminating network shall, on expiry of thirty seconds in case of Cellular Mobile Telephone Service and sixty seconds in case of Basic Telephone Service, release the incoming voice call and transmit the call release message to the originating network. However, the originating network may release an unanswered call after ninety seconds in case the call release message is not received from the terminating network.
TRAI has made this decision a month after Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel were in a debate with regards to calling ringing time of outgoing calls. Till now, Bharti Airtel has been offering a ringing time of 45 seconds and it is believed that this provided sufficient time to pick up a call. Airtel also suggested TRAI that the receiving network should have the say on how much should be the ring time for an incoming call to one of its customers. Jio, however, reduced the ring time in order to avoid incurring the IUC charges and it brought it down to as low as 20 seconds. Vodafone meanwhile suggested the ring time should be around 30 seconds.
With uneven ring times, customers often ended up giving missed calls to others. And if the receiving customer called back, that network had to pay the IUC charges and hence, expenses rose for that particular network. Jio initially was incurring a lot of IUC charges but after reducing its ring time, the situation revered and other operators had to pay more IUC charges.
With the ring time now set to a standard limit, all operators will have to allow callers to witness a ring time of 30 seconds whether the call goes unanswered or is canceled. The uniform ring time will offer a uniform opportunity to all operators and should even out the expenses.
