Tata Tele offers to compensate if service quality turns below par

14 March 2008

Mumbai: Tata Teleservices, India's fifth-largest mobile phone operator, has offered to compensate subscribers "voluntarily" if the quality of their services was below standard.

"We will come out with a customer chart setting more stringent quality norms compared to telecom regulator TRAI and if we fail to comply with those standards we are ready to pay penalty to our subscribers," Anil Sardana, managing director of Tata Teleservices, said.

Sardana said the government is likely to meet the cellular operators on the issue of value-added services. He said the government approval was required not only in case of BlackBerry but for all value-added services.

"We have been taking the government's approval for all value-added services even if its takes months but the same is not true in case of others so what we want is that rules should be same for all," he added.

Tata Tele, Sardana said, has become the number two telecom operator in Delhi and the NCR with over three million subscribers and was aiming to become the top player in the region by March 2009.

He said Tata Tele's average revenue per user had increased even as the ARPU of all other operators were under pressure due to falling tariffs. He, however, did not specify the actual accruals to the company.