TRAI urges Indian telcos to prioritize Quality of Service amid 5G rollout

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has directed telecom service providers to improve the quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience for consumers, while also ensuring that the rollout of 5G services does not adversely affect existing telecom services in the country.  

TRAI has directed telecom service providers to take urgent steps to demonstrate visible improvement in the quality of service and quality of experience by consumers. This includes analyzing the issue of call muting and one-way speech and taking corrective action on priority. Call muting is a phenomenon that occurs during a call where the voice is not heard by one or either party for a few seconds and is most prevalent over VoLTE services.

TRAI has also asked telecom service providers to plan and implement systems for online data collection for QoS benchmarks and their processing to generate performance reports at a license service area, state level, or lower granularity. This will simplify the process of QoS performance reporting and reduce the compliance burden.

In addition, TRAI has asked telecom service providers to implement two directions issued by TRAI to curb the misuse of headers and message templates of principal entities (PEs) by some telemarketers, as well as messages from unauthorised or unregistered telemarketers, including those using telephone numbers. 

The two directions aim to minimize unwanted calls from registered telemarketers or 10-digit numbers and bring them onto a distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform for management and monitoring.

Considering the scale and size of the network being set up for the rollout of 5G services, TRAI has asked telecom service providers to implement systems for internal QoS monitoring on a 24×7 and 360-degree basis. They should also exploit network features as per standard and adopt artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) techniques for QoS monitoring and management.

TRAI further directed TSPs to ensure that there is a minimal disturbance or degradation of the quality of service of existing telecom services while rolling out the 5G network. They were informed that TRAI is closely monitoring the incidences of long-duration network outages, which adversely affect the quality of services and consumer experience. All telecom providers were asked to report such outages to TRAI in any district or state. TRAI also stated that it may consider bringing suitable regulations in this regard if required.