KOLKATA: Households across the city’s suburbs and districts have complained of pay channels being arbitrarily shut down from midnight despite an explicit order by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) asking multi-service operators (MSOs) to ensure consumers are not inconvenienced by blackouts during the switchover to the new cable television tariff regime.On Thursday afternoon, hundreds of local cable operators demonstrated before the Trai office in Kolkata, demanding action against MSOs for switching off pay channels late on Wednesday night. “Offices of LCOs in Rajabazar and Beltala in the city and elsewhere in the districts, including Bankura and Burdwan have been attacked by irate consumers after MSOs switched off pay channels. We want Trai to intervene and ensure there is no arbitrary move by the MSOs that creates a law and order problem,” demanded Apurba Bhattacharyya of Cable Operators’ Sangram Committee, adding Trai should have had a better monitoring mechanism to ensure a smooth transition.Though Trai had in its communication on Tuesday explicitly stated pay channels to consumers who are yet to make a switch to the new regime should not be deactivated. The pay channel blackout has happened in phases, with some consumers receiving a rude shock on February 3 and others in the wee hours of February 14.The situation is even more piquant for LCOs that have consumers who had made the choice and paid for the new package. “Consumers expect the packages to be switched on within minutes of paying. That isn’t happening right now and that is what is causes unrest,” said south Kolkata cable operator Tapash Das.MSOs denied they had pulled the plug on consumers. Instead, they pointed to a technical glitch in migrating consumers from the existing pack to a best-fit plan as per Trai suggestion. “We have to take consumers off the existing packs and load the new packs against their account. Given the high intensity of traffic at this juncture, the servers aren’t able to perform as efficienctly as they usually do. Thus the migration time for a customer that should take a few seconds is taking considerably longer. During the interim period, the pay channels are going off the air,” an MSO official explained.LCOs, however, said that while it was taking 30-60 minutes to execute one command in the portals of some national MSOs, others weren’t functioning at all. “It is clear that MSOs weren’t prepared for the migration but did not reveal so lest their license is cancelled by Trai. It is the LCOs that are at the receiving end of the consumer ire,” said Pradipta Karmakar of Biswa Banga Cable Operators’ Association.A section of MSOs and LCOs also blamed Trai for the confusion caused by the constant shift in deadline for switchover to the new cable tariff regime. “Consumers are misinterpreting Trai’s orders. It has asked us to offer a best-fit pack, which is a package of free-to-air and pay channels closest to the one that consumers had in terms of price. COnsumers are mistaking this for contiuance of the old package. That is not possible because the base FTA pack price has increased, leaving less in the kitty for pay channels,” another MSO official reasoned.

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