TRAI calls for improved service

NEW DELHI: India is attracting global vendors with its unprecedented growth of its telecom sector. However, while the numbers of subscribers seem to grow by the day, the quality of services continues to lag behind. A recent survey by the regulatory body for the Indian telecom industry, TRAI, along with IMRB has assessd quality of service provided by Basic, GSM and CDMA telecom service providers for the period October-December 2003. Both the objective audit and subjective survey suggest that the basic services being provided are not up to the desired standards.

This calls for an urgent need for improvement of quality of services among basic service providers. The situation is quite bad in respect of following parameters, provision of new connections within seven days, number of faults per 100 subscribers per month, time taken to repair the faults, time taken to shift connection and closures.

According to the survey, it is also observed that quality of services of basic operators is at somewhat acceptable levels in metros and A-class circles. However, it is very poor in the B and C circles. Similarly, quality of basic services in the East and North zones lags behind West and South zones by a fair margin.

On the whole, it has been observed that cellular operators are providing much better quality of service than their basic service counterparts. Fierce competition in the cellular market has forced operators to constantly keep improving their networks resulting in acceptable levels of service. Nevertheless, the areas where there is scope for improvement are as follows, billing complaint incidence, call success rate and accumulated downtime of community isolation.

Compared to the service in Metros, A and B circles, the quality of mobile service in C circles is relatively poor. It seems that not enough investment is being made by operators to improve their services in the C circles. It has been observed that quality of cellular service needs significant improvement in the eastern region.

The key concern areas for CDMA operators are billing complaint incidence, billing complaint resolution and fault incidence, in that order. The performance of the CDMA operators on the remaining parameters is good.

Based on this survey report and also the quarterly performance monitoring report submitted by the service providers, the Authority has initiated an exercise to modify the Quality of Service parameters wherever the prescribed benchmarks seems unrealistic.

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