TRAI may offer some leeway on service quality rules to telcos

New Delhi: The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is likely to relax some of the parameters in the proposed quality of service (QoS) rules that have been termed too stringent to meet by the industry. The regulator though has stressed that telecom operators must improve service quality, especially on the back of the recent tariff hikes.

"The telcos have submitted their comments on the draft regulations during the consultation process. We are aware of the challenges and the final rules would likely address issues raised by the telcos," a senior official said, asking not to be named.

The regulator is likely to issue the final rules in a month or so after taking account of the industry concerns, officials added.


TRAI in August last year proposed strict performance benchmarks for service providers, seeking to eliminate instances of call drops and setting separate yardsticks for 5G services to help improve the consumer experience.

In the proposed regulations on quality of service for wireless, wireline and broadband services, TRAI had incorporated additional parameters for reporting while seeking data at a granular level on a monthly basis. The guidelines around call drops, coverage, network downtown, latency parameters for broadband services, etc., were made more stringent.

Telcos have cited technical challenges to providing such a large quantum of data, while seeking to continue with the existing regulations on QoS. They have submitted their written comments on the draft regulations and also highlighted their issues in an open house discussion on the matter.

The challenges were again highlighted in a meeting held Thursday between the telcos and Trai officials to find a consensus on the issue. The regulator, though, made it clear that QoS should be improved as consumers should not suffer.

"There is no need to massively overhaul the QoS regulations. There should be a light-touch regulatory framework and QoS can also be analysed based on third-party apps data," an executive present during the meeting told ET.

In the latest meeting, the industry stressed that the dropped call rate (DCR) parameter should be technology agnostic and shouldn’t be specific to 2G/3G and 4G/5G, as it can lead to a telco becoming perpetual non-compliant, another industry executives present in the meeting told ET.

The regulator had proposed technology-specific reporting for call drops – one to assess the 2G/3G networks and another for 4G/5G. The parameter to assess the 4G/5G networks was more stringent.

Similarly for broadband services, since the LTE (4G) and 5G networks support low latency, the QoS benchmark for the latency parameter was proposed to be less than 100 milliseconds (ms) from 250 ms, which was prescribed in 2012.

Also, Trai has proposed revising the benchmark of network downtime to a cell level in place of the current base station (BTS) level, to have a granular view of network availability.

However, as per an industry executive, currently customers are served through multiple cells of the same BTS or of different base stations. It does not mean that if a cell is down, the customer is not getting services.

The telcos have also opposed sharing of data on a monthly basis as against quarterly in the current regime.

On submission of data state-wise, the telcos highlighted that it would be difficult because different jurisdictions are involved for different licensed service areas. Further, there will be difficulties in aggregation and coordination of data as it will require a new ID system to be set up that will entail cost and time, another industry executive present at the meeting said.