Telecom regulator TRAI said on Friday that it had received so many complaints about dropped calls from users that it needed to review existing quality-of-service rules to measure network performance at the district level and bring 4G-5G services under its jurisdiction.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has stated that despite advances in mobile communication technology and performance management tools, the quality of experience (QoE) for consumers has not improved as expected, although such quality of service (QoS) requires technical standards support.
“Despite the widespread 4G network coverage in the country and the launch of 5G services, the increasing number of complaints about dropped calls, muted calls, low data throughput, etc. raises questions about network design and allocation of required network resources, said Tray.
The regulator proposes tightening parameters for dropped calls, call success rates and more under quality of service rules.
“Issues related to the quality of telecommunication services are not only reflected in consumer complaints but are also heavily mentioned in parliamentary questions,” TRAI said.
The regulator said the Wireless Data Service Quality Standard was developed in the era of 2G and 3G services, in which data services were delivered over circuit-switched networks and whose QoS performance benchmarks were set based on the capabilities of the underlying technology.
Currently, the packet core network using LTE (4G), LTE-Advanced and 5G technologies constitutes more than 75% of the country’s telecom network. It said current QoS benchmarks envision latency below 250 milliseconds (ms) for wireless data services and 120 ms for wired broadband services, which is out of sync with the requirements of today’s applications.
“In the current regulations, QoS parameters and benchmarks for voice and data services are technology-agnostic. Terminology related to 5G services has also been updated in the draft regulations to monitor the QoS performance of 5G,” Trai said.
Currently, service quality is measured at the telecommunication circle level, which is generally equal to the size of the national level.
Performance against certain QoS benchmarks, such as network availability and drop rates, varies by region, TRAI said.
“Due to the averaging of LSAs, even very poor QoS baseline performance in a few regions may not be reflected in performance reports. So, in this case, it may even be necessary to review the performance of the QoS baseline at the regional level, if desired.” the regulator said.
TRAI has observed that although service providers have rolled out mobile applications and web interfaces for customers, consumers are still facing issues in registering complaints due to complicated workflows.
The number of calls to call centers has not decreased, and even after the rollout of the mobile app, service providers are in many cases unable to meet current benchmarks, the company said.
“Furthermore, there are a considerable number of feature phones in the mobile network that cannot use the mobile app for complaint registration. Therefore, the Authority is not in favor of relaxing the sub-parameter accessibility benchmarks for call center number and percentage of calls answered by operator (voice-to-voice) ,” TRAI said.
The regulator has set Sept. 20 as the deadline for comments and Oct. 5 as the deadline for objections to the draft rule.
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