New Delhi, The Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal has rejected an application by Home Systems Pvt Ltd.Mumbai challenging the methodology of Broadcasting Engineering Consultants (India) Ltd as it felt that procedure adopted adopted is  absolutely correct and there is no error in the report.

Chairman Justice Aftab Alam and member Kuldip Singh listed the matter for further hearing on 6 April.

At the outset, it said the application had been filed by Home Systems Pvt Ltd.Mumbai in its dispute with Star India seeking a review of the order of the Tribunal of 21 January.

Home Systems said the SMS count given by BECIL for he period in dispute is the total number of subscribers on the network and not the total number of authorised subscribers, which the petitioner says is the relevant number for making payments to the broadcaster.
Home Systems said the figure calculated by BECIL for active subscribers is based on command logs of SMS. He submitted that sometimes a command is given in the SMS with wrong STB number or VC Card Number and this leads to counting the same subscriber multiple times. Thus, Home Systems said BECIL has made an error in arriving at the figure of active subscribers. It submitted that there are three different numbers possible in SMS and that is why there is need to reconcile the SMS and CAS data.

BECIL said it had taken active subscribers both from the SMS data base and CAS data base. Since the figures obtained from SMS data base were lower than the CAS data base, BECIL discussed this with the petitioner at the time of audit. It  is due to a stop  (suspension) command  which may  suspend a subscriber temporarily in the SMS  but the entitlement for the Subscriber still remains intact in CAS.  BECIL accordingly added  all such subscribers that were  in suspention to the active subscribers to arrive at the SMS figures.

BECIL sadi a subscriber who is temporarily suspended cannot be considered as de-activated. If such a subscriber was to be counted as de-activated, this could lead to a situation where there is under-reporting of subscribers as the ervice provider may use this command to suspend the subscribers temporarily  for some time at the time  of  taking the SMS figures  and immediately thereafter, restore them to active status.