TRAI releases new standards for quality of service for telcos, ISPs
This common set of regulations, called the Standards of Quality of Service of Access (wireline and wireless) and Broadband (wireline and wireless) Service Regulations, 2024, replaces and supersedes the three older regulations
New Delhi: The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Friday released the revised regulations to set standards of quality of service (QoS) for telecom and internet service providers that have more than 10,000 subscribers. This includes landline services, mobile services, and broadband services.
This common set of regulations, called the Standards of Quality of Service of Access (wireline and wireless) and Broadband (wireline and wireless) Service Regulations, 2024, replaces and supersedes the three older regulations.
The new regulations were finalised after the telecom regulatory held a consultation with stakeholders that started in August 2023.
QoS performance of mobile services will be monitored monthly instead of quarterly. To enable a smooth transition, the service providers have been given six months from the effective date of regulation. Benchmarks for parameters such as network availability, call drop rate, packet drop rate, and latency have been tightened to ensure better QoS. However, service providers will be given six to thirty months to upgrade their networks.
Under the new regulations, the service providers must publish on their website their QoS performance across parameters such as cumulative downtime (when cells were not available for service), mean time to repair, how long it takes to fix a fault, latency and packet drop rate for broadband services, connections with good voice quality, and others prescribed in the regulations.
Service providers must also display technology-wise (2G, 3G, 4G, or 5G) mobile coverage maps on their websites so that customers can make informed decisions.
Acceptable amount of latency has been revised while new parameters—jitter (latency variation above and below the mean latency value) and packet drop rates (percentage of voice packets dropped by or lost in the network while uplinking or downlinking data)—have been introduced.
To ensure that all service providers are evaluated across the same parameters, the regulations prescribe a detailed measurement methodology for different parameters.
Graded financial disincentives (FD) that increase with continued non-compliance have been introduced for all services; earlier, they were graded only for some services.
For instance, the minister of state for communications informed the Lok Sabha in a written response on Wednesday that in FY24, a financial disincentive of Rs.1 lakh was imposed on MTNL for a higher than acceptable amount of drop call rate.
In FY23, no FDs were imposed. In FY22 and FY21, FDs of Rs.7 lakh and Rs.15 lakh, respectively, were imposed on BSNL. In FY21, Rs.5 lakh FD was imposed on Idea (not Vodafone Idea Limited). In FY20, FDs worth Rs.42 lakh, Rs.8.5 lakh and rs.2.5 lakh were imposed on BSNL, Idea, and Vodafone, respectively.