Private GSM operators on Thursday got a reprieve from Supreme Court, which has stayed Telecom Regulatory Authority of India's notices asking them to refund excess charges levied from customers on calls made to the networks of PSU telecom firms like BSNL and MTNL.
A bench headed by Justice H K Sema, while staying the refund notices issued by TRAI, also asked the regulator, BSNL and MTNL to file their replies within three weeks.
Cellular Operators Association of India and private GSM mobile operators including Reliance Telecom Ltd, Aircel Ltd, BPL Mobile Communications, Bharti Televentures, Idea Cellular, and Hutchison Essar had challenged telecom tribunal TDSAT's order asking private GSM mobile operators to stop charging differential tariffs for calls terminating on the PSU networks in four states of Maharashtra, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh.
The TDSAT order had come on a petition filed by mobile operators challenging TRAI direction's issued on February 27, 2006 asking these operators in the four states to stop charging differential tariffs for calls made by their subscribers to BSNL or MTNL users.
Cellular operators counsels Harish Salve and Naveen Chawla, while expressing inability to comply with the TRAI orders, contended that it was not possible for the mobile operators to refund the money to subscribers as it had already paid the excess amounts to BSNL and any further amount to be refunded would have to be shelled out from their own pockets.
TRAI counsels Sanjay Kapur and Arti opposed the petition saying that the operators will have to comply with the regulator's directive and deposit the excess payment collected by them on account of differential tariffs in a separate account and refund the same to their subscribers in these states.
Terming TRAI's action as incorrect and arbitrary, the operators stated that the interconnection usage charges and carriage carriages do not allow them to offer similar rates to all subscribers within the states.
According to them, since there was no direct connectivity between networks, calls had to be routed like STD calls which necessitated higher tariffs.
The Tribunal had failed to consider that differentiation in price of a product or a service on the basis of its cost can never be termed as discriminatory or based on unreasonable classification.