Telecommunications (telcos) companies in India have expressed their concern over the new Standards of Quality (QoS) rules set by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).
On August 2, TRAI released a revised QoS of service for access and broadband services, which the authority said have been finalised following a detailed consultative process. In response, the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) released a statement, that said the new rules will increase compliance costs for service providers without any commensurate benefits for the customers.
COAI represents private-sector telecom operators Reliance Jio, Vodafone Idea, and Bharti Airtel.
TRAI revised rules mandates for telecom operators to compensate subscribers in case of service outages for more than 24 hours at a district level. It has also increased the penal amount to Rs 1 lakh from Rs 50,000 for failing to meet each quality benchmark under the new rules. The regulator has introduced a graded penalty system of Rs 1 lakh, Rs 2 lakh, Rs 5 lakh and Rs 10 lakh for different scales of rule violations and submitting false report under revised regulations.
S P Kochhar, Director General, COAI, said, “While TRAI has tightened the QoS benchmarks over the years, the ground realities remain unchanged. TSPs still grapple with Right of Way (RoW) issues when acquiring permissions for infrastructure deployment in public and private land for the installation of cell towers and fiber-optic cables.”
“Moreover, interference from various sources, such as other wireless devices and electromagnetic interference, degrade signal quality and network performance. Further, illegal boosters and repeaters used by unauthorised agents, as well as the cases of theft of equipment are also external factors which, nevertheless, impact the QoS,” he added.
He said that the situation is further aggravated due to additional requirement of street furniture for 5G networks. Additionally, frequent takedowns of the overhead fiber by the authorities have a significant impact on QoS as well.
Kochhar said that the industry has concern over the proposed regulations, which not only tighten benchmarks but also shift from quarterly to monthly reporting and site to cell level reporting in many cases.
The revised rules include:
-Mandating service providers to display technology (2G/3G/4G/5G) wise mobile coverage maps on their website, to enable consumers to make informed decisions.
-To bring transparency in QoS performance reporting, the service providers have been mandated to publish QoS performance, against prescribed parameters, on their website.
-Considering the performance requirement of new emerging applications, the benchmark for Latency parameter has been aligned with global standards and new parameters for Jitter and Packet drop rate have been introduced.
-To enable timely redressal of network issues by the service providers, QoS performance of mobile service shall now be monitored on monthly instead of quarterly basis. However, for smooth transition to monthly reporting, service providers have been given six months’ time from the effective date of the regulation.
-To have insight of performance at granular level, the Authority has decided to collect performance against certain parameters like network availability, call drop, voice packet drop rate in uplink and downlink, etc on Cell level.
-To achieve adoption of uniform methodology by different service providers while measuring and reporting the performance, a detailed and unambiguous measurement methodology has been prescribed in the regulation.
-The Authority has decided to tighten the benchmarks for some key parameters like network availability (cumulative downtime and worst affected Cells due to downtime), call drop rate, packet drop rate, latency etc. in a graded manner over a time frame of six months to two and half years to enable service providers to upgrade their networks, wherever needed.
-As averaging on QoS parameter performance in certain cases does not clearly bring out problem areas, the measurement methodology for some key parameters like Downlink and Uplink Packet Drop Rate, Latency, Point of Interconnection (PoI) Congestion, Download and upload speed, Maximum Bandwidth utilization between radio and core network during busy hour etc. has been changed from average to percentile basis. This will enable identification of pockets of degraded QoS performance for corrective action by service providers.
-In addition to requirement for display of mobile coverage map, new parameters like reporting of significant network outages, jitter, maximum bandwidth utilization between radio and core network during busy hour and SMS delivery success rate etc. have been introduced.
-QoS parameters have been rationalized further, based on the impact on consumer experience and relevance in the present context, as against global benchmarks. For example, parameters like Shifting of Telephone Connections, Grade of Service for Local Exchange, etc have been deleted and few parameters have been shifted from compliance to monitoring by the service providers.
-With the simplification and objectivity in the QoS performance measurement criteria and smooth compliance, the service providers have been mandated to upgrade their system for online monitoring and reporting of QoS performance.
-Delivering QoS is a lifecycle activity that can only be achieved through the adoption of best practices in the quality management domain. Therefore, Service providers have been asked to adopt Six Sigma Quality Management Plan to achieve continuous improvement in the quality of services.
-In order to achieve time bound action on QoS related issues and early resolution of non-compliant QoS performance in the network, graded financial disincentives, increasing with continued non-compliance, have been introduced for all services.
The regulations will come into force with effect from October 1.
COAI expressed concerns with the stringency of these new regulations.