A few days ago, Ghana’s National Communication Authority (NCA) announced that it would fine errant mobile operators who failed to offer quality mobile services, with NCA officials making special field trips to obtain public feedback on the quality of the mobile network and telecom services. The fact that many citizens said that they were unhappy with the current mobile services, led the NCA to issue this warning to telcos, while the telecom authority is also looking at other strategies to address the problems.
Indian operators are yet to become serious about quality of services. The industry thought that the mobile number portability will prompt mobile operators to improve QoS. MNP was a disaster and QoS is yet to improve.
Indian telecom regulator, TRAI has come up with several parameters and regulations surrounding mobile and wireline services, and the monitoring of the point of interconnection and congestion between various service provider networks on a monthly basis.
This parameter signifies the ease with which a customer of one network is able to communicate with a customer of another network. This parameter also reflects as to how effective is the interconnection between two networks. The benchmark notified by TRAI in the QoS Regulations for this parameter is <0.5 percent. This means out of 200 calls between two operators only one call should face congestion. However, with a growing subscriber base of approximately 21 million per month, the result of the monitoring reveals that degree of congestion between the operators is far more than the benchmark in number of areas.
According to the latest report on QoS by TRAI, dated August 9, 2011, The POI Congestion Report shows that the performance of the service providers with respect to the congestion on POIs has improved in the month of March 2011 as compared with the performance in December 2011. Amongst the service providers as of March 2011, the service providers having highest number of congestion in their POIs are Uninor, Etisalat, BSNL, Aircel, S Tel, Videocon, and Bharti Airtel. The most affected circles/states due to POI congestion are Bihar, followed by Mumbai, West Bengal, UP-East, UP-West and Tamil Nadu. For wireline services, too, the telecom authority claims the interconnection congestion has improved by 50 percent in March 2011, from December 2010.
However, with increasing data usage, especially with 3G, more and more subscribers have been complaining of traffic congestion, dropped calls and breaks in downloads, as well as an inability for the operator to seamlessly flow from 2G to 3G when required. This has been blamed on not more being spent to attract users to VAS services of 3G, rather than spending on expanding the network to accommodate 3G and existing 2G traffic.
In a QoS survey conducted by TRAI in the states of MP and Chattisgarh in May 2011, TTSL was rated as the best telecom network, with Tata Indicom and Tata DOCOMO both having the least call drop rate, best voice quality of calls, least network downtime, highest call completion rate within the local network, and 100 percent resolution to customer complaints. However, TTSL fell to sixth place among the top 10 service providers in the country based on revenues.
Loop Telecom also conducted a survey in 100 towns in Maharashtra and concluded that it had the number one network, and did widespread advertising for the same. However, Loop mobile is ranked 12th in terms of revenues and according to recent report, is looking to exit the telecom sector in India altogether.
While TRAI does not have the power to punish operators, consumer courts which have been very effective in the country for tackling consumer complaints, have not been able to penalize service providers or come up with effective solutions for getting to the root of the problem. Subscribers are lured to join new networks or latch on to attractive schemes by operators seeking to compete with each other, with a promise of the best network, but a few months into the service, they realize they are experiencing the same painful issues, with no firm resolution in sight.
In contrast, in Africa, according to ITU statistics, mobile penetration in Africa in 2010 was 45.2 percent, while internet user penetration in Africa grew over 20-fold in the decade to 2010, from 0.5 percent to 10.8 percent.
Looking at the need to develop still better quality of service in certain areas, especially on parameters relating to the ability to draw up commercial SLA contracts, including procedures for their verification, enabling network users, such as enterprises with VPN and VLAN needs, e-government operators, IP telephony operators and generally users that rely on IT for their business efficiency, to seek the best network providers, optimize their infrastructure, a workshop on Quality of Service for African Countries is being held from October 3-7, 2011 in Uganda, with attendees being a mix of developers, service providers and subscribers.
There are a lot of lessons to be learned from Africa. An emerging nation, with drastic differences in the topography of the country, making penetration of rural telecom services a problem. However, where fixed line roll out lacked – accounting for only 2.8 percent of the subscriber base, the mobile subscriber base has been steadily growing at around 65 percent y-o-y, with South Africa reporting over 30 million subscribers. Airtel, which started its African sojourn a year ago, with a $10.7 billion acquisition of Zain, has expanded its operations to 19 countries in the continent, and is actively pushing for roll out of 3G and 4G services. Many other countries are also starting to view Africa as a flourishing market, and lately France Telecom is also looking to acquire a piece of the pie.
With a strong regulatory body, that is open to expanding and liberalizing for the greater good and to make up for lost time with respect to emerging technologies around the world, Africa may soon launch LTE as well. India could do well to keep up and not let wasteful scams tarnish its image of one of the best emerging telecom nations in the world.
By Beryl M
editor@telecomlead.com
