Trai Asks Telcos to Take Immediate Steps for Reforms Quality of Services

New Delhi: The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has directed telecom service providers to take immediate steps to demonstrate visible improvement in the quality of service and quality of experience by the consumers.

The message was given during the Authority’s meeting with major Telecom Service Providers (TSPs) to review issues related to the quality of telecom services faced by consumers and the threat of Unsolicited Commercial Communications (UCC). According to a statement issued on Friday evening, TSPs were asked to analyze the issue of call muting and one-way speech and take corrective action on a priority basis. While rolling out fifth-generation mobile system (5G) networks, TRAI said TSPs should ensure that there is a minimum disturbance or degradation in the quality of service (QoS) of existing telecom services.

The TSPs were further informed that TRAI is closely monitoring the incidents of network outages of prolonged duration. Such outages adversely affect the quality of services and consumer experience. According to the statement, all telecom providers were asked to report such outages in any district or state to TRAI. TRAI said that if the need arises, it may consider bringing suitable regulation in this regard. The authority also asked TSPs to plan and implement systems for online data collection for QoS benchmarks and their processing to generate performance reports with license service area, state level, or lower granularity. This will simplify the process of QoS performance reporting by TSPs and thus reduce the compliance burden as per TRAI.

Considering the scale and size of the networks being set up for the roll-out of 5G services, and the significant use cases being developed by various industry verticals, TRAI has mandated TSPs to provide 24X7 and 360- TSPs have been asked to implement systems for internal QoS monitoring depending on the degree. It was also suggested during the meeting to exploit network facilities as per standards and adopt artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) techniques for QoS monitoring and management.

TRAI has also asked TSPs to implement the two directions issued by TRAI on Thursday in a time-bound manner. These two directions have been issued to prevent misuse of Principal Entities (PE) headers and message templates by some telemarketers and also messages from unauthorized or unregistered telemarketers including telemarketers using telephone numbers.

To curtail unwanted calls from registered telemarketers or 10-digit numbers and bring them to the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) platform for management and monitoring.