The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has decided to review its standards on the quality of services issue and asked telecom operators to even report network outages in states and districts.”Our endeavour will be to provide the best quality of service to the consumers.
No telecom operator would like their consumers to have poor experience and wherever they fail, it will be the responsibility of Trai to intervene and take necessary action against them,” PD Vaghela, chairman TRAI, told Fe in an interview.
“That is why, we have decided to take a granular approach and look at the quality of services at state levels and district levels,” Vaghela added.Going by the present parameters to check quality of services, Trai follows an averaging pattern from a licensed service area (LSA) point of view, which in a way does not present a clear picture about outages and issues in small states and other areas.
In a closed door meeting with telecom operators on Friday, Trai has asked telecom operators to take urgent steps for improving quality of services and experience of consumers. The discussions happened on tackling call drops, muted calls, and improve the quality of services.
“In the first phase, we have decided that we will start looking at the quality of service at the state level and after assessing that, we will then go to district levels. Presently, may be in far-flung areas and hilly areas we may go for the district kind of monitoring also,” Vaghela said.
Telecom companies will have to generate performance reports related to service quality on a three-month averaging presently. Considering the scale and size of network being set up for rollout of 5G services and growing usecases, Trai has also asked telcos to install internal service quality monitoring systems on a regular basis using artificial intelligence and machine learning.
In the meeting, the telecom service providers also raised concerns of poor quality of handsets affecting the service quality. Further, they admitted that there were service quality issues with the launch of 5G services owing to lower number of base transceiver stations (BTSs).”They did mention that 5G created some problem in the quality of services but our concern was that they should have declared it to the consumers. However, they have said most of issues have been resolved as more cells and BTS have come up,” Vaghela said.
“One of the telecom operators did mention about poor quality of handsets affecting service quality, we have asked them to give us and DoT, the details of those smartphone brands which are of poor quality,” Vaghela added.
If needed, the telecom regulator will also bring out separate consultations on improvement of service quality with further regulations.In order to tackle the menace of pesky communication, especially those coming from a 10-digit phone number, Trai chairman said telecom operators such as Vodafone Idea are working on some technology to detect that using machine learning and artificial intelligence, and we will be able to see implementation across operators within the next 2-3 months.
On Thursday, Trai asked the telecom operators to reverify registered SMS templates used by companies for messages and bar unauthorised telemarketers. The direction comes after Trai observed misuse of templates for headers and SMS for promotional messages by telemarketers, wherein they were found inserting undesirable content.
As per the Trai order, the telcos have been asked to block the unverified headers and message templates on DLT (distributed ledger technology) platform within 30 and 60 days, respectively.Trai is also taking support from imprortant ministries, departments and the Reserve Bank of India that have significant influence on banks, to take action with regard to cleaning of message templates and removing unnecessary headers, Vaghela said.