Trai sets final deadline for subscriber details in DAS phase II cities

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has come out with the final deadline for  the entry of subscriber details in the subscriber management systems (SMS) in DAS phase II cities.

Failure to submit the details  would result in multi system operators (MSOs) switching off TV signals of such subscriptions.

In a note issued yesterday, TRAI said that MSOs in 23 cities which had seen 90 per cent of the task of collecting consumer application forms (CAF) completed would cut off signals from 27 January to those subscribers who had not submitted their details.

According to the regulator, 80 per cent of the task had been completed in the remaining eight cities viz Patna, Ahmedabad, Ranchi, Bengaluru, Kalyan-Dombivali, Nagpur, Navi Mumbai and Thane. For these cities TRAI had set 31 January, 2014 as the final deadline.

As a result, non-complying television subscribers in Rajkot, Surat, Vadodara, Faridabad, Mysore, Aurangabad, Nasik, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Pune, Sholapur, Amritsar, Ludhiana, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Agra, Allahabad, Ghaziabad, Kanpur, Lucknow, Meerut, Varanasi, Chandigarh and Howrah would face a black-out.

While new deadline set for MSOs in Bhopal, Indore and Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh is 7 February, the last date in cities like Vishakhapatnam and Srinagar is February. However, no deadline had been fixed yet for the state of  Tamil Nadu and Hyderabad city given the pending legal cases regarding implementation of Digital Addressable Cable TV Systems (DAS).

MSOs would need to provide bills with exact breakup of charges and subscribers would have to insist for a bill and receipt or see blacked out screens.

Meanwhile, Trai yesterday extended the deadline for cable television digitisation in Bangalore and Mysore till 31 January.

About 1 lakh TV screens could have gone blank with the expiry of the 31 December deadline said Sibichen K Mathew, advisor and head of Karnataka and Kerala region. He added, in order not to inconvenience people, they had been given a transition time of another two weeks.

He, however, added there was no question of any further extension to the deadline. With the expiry of the time frame for the third phase of digitisation, nearly 20 per cent TV viewing homes in Bangalore and about 10 per cent in Mysore had not yet been installed.