The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Friday issued directions to all telecom service providers (TSPs) to submit quality of services (QoS) reports for each State and Union Territory (UTs), from the quarter ending March 31.
The authority has observed that submission of State and UT-wise data for QoS parameters to the authority is an essential requirement for optimum analysis of QoS provided in various States and UTs.
“The authority, in exercise of the powers conferred hereby directs that all the basic telephone service providers and cellular mobile telephone service providers to submit the State and Union Territory-wise data, in respect of QoS parameters specified in regulation… on quarterly basis, starting from the quarter ending March 31,” the TRAI said.
Data should be submitted in electronic form, duly signed by the authorised signatory of the service provider, within 45 days from the end of each quarter for basic telephone service (wireline) and within 21 days from the end of each quarter for cellular mobile telephone service.
“Licensed service area (LSA) wise data as currently being submitted through various private mobile radios (PMRs) shall continue to be submitted as per scheduled defined,” it said.
Call drop data
TRAI had last week in a review meeting made it clear that it will ask TSPs to report call drop data at State level too, amid rising instances of service quality issues and consumer complaints. However, earlier this week, mobile operators’ body COAI said reporting call drop data even State-wise entails several administrative and execution “difficulties” on ground, and that reporting should continue at the LSA level.
Meanwhile, the TRAI on Friday, has also notified a draft regulation on QoS (Code of Practice for Metering and Billing Accuracy) Regulations, 2023 and decided that every service provider should ensure that there is no inconsistency in respect of the tariff offerings across various platforms.
Further to start with, the tariff offering filed by service providers with TRAI should be verified during the audit, for consistency.
It said all of the LSAs are audited for accuracy of metering and billing at least once in a financial year and the audit should be conducted in such a manner, the LSAs are uniformly distributed throughout the four quarters of the financial year.
Metering, billing sysytem
The authority has also decided that “audit of the metering and billing systems whether centralised or distributed is to also be done before taking up the audit of the LSAs being served by that metering and billing system”.
This will enable detection of errors due to wrong configuration leading to wrong charging incidences.
The TRAI also mentioned that the service providers are reluctant to share their systems with auditors for audit purpose. However, being a responsible telecom regulator, it is imperative for authority to take care of the interests of the consumers, it added.
The authority has also decided to issue a new regulation repealing existing regulation instead of issuing amendments to the existing regulations, it added.
