TRAI Reviews Quality of Telecom Services with Telecom Service Providers

· Shows concern on Unsolicited Commercial Communications

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) held meeting with major Telecom Service Providers (TSPs), on 18 February, 2023, to review the issues related to quality of telecom services being faced by consumers and the menace of unsolicited commercial communications (UCC).

Authority has directed TSPs to take urgent steps to demonstrate visible improvement in quality of service and quality of experience by consumers. TSPs were asked to analyse the issue of call muting and one way speech and take corrective action on priority. While rolling out 5G network, TSPs should ensure that there is least disturbance or degradation of QoS of existing telecom services.

TSPs were further informed that TRAI is closely monitoring the incidences of long duration network outages. Such outages adversely affect quality of services and consumer experience. All the telecom providers were asked to report such outages to TRAI in any district or State. TRAI may consider bringing suitable regulation in this regard, if required.

TRAI 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 process of QoS performance reporting by TSPs and thereby reduction in compliance burden.

Considering the scale and size of network, being set up for rollout of 5G services, and important use cases being developed by different industry verticals, TRAI asked TSPs to implement systems for internal QoS monitoring by TSPs on 24x7 and 360-degree basis. The exploitation of network features as per standard and adoption of AI/ML techniques for QoS monitoring and management was also suggested.

TRAI has also asked TSPs to implement two directions, issued by TRAI on 16.02.2023, in a time bound manner. These two directions have been issued to curb the misuse of Headers and Message Templates of Principal Entities (PEs) by some Telemarketers and also the messages from unauthorized or unregistered telemarketers, including telemarketers using telephone numbers.

To minimise unwanted calls from registered telemarketers or 10 digit numbers and bring them on DLT platform for management and monitoring.