Amid rising number of service quality issues and consumer complaints, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has urged telecom operators to report call drop and outage data even at the state level and to “demonstrate visible improvement” in quality of service immediately. called upon to take action. and connectivity experience for consumers across the country.
On the issue of obnoxious promotional calls and messages, TRAI said that telecom companies will be asked to implement AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning) tools to detect and block spam sent by unregistered telemarketers through telephones. It has been found effective in preventing it. Numbers (10 digit numbers).
TRAI Chairman PD Vaghela said, “This new comprehensive tool (currently being tested by Vodafone Idea) expected to be implemented by the industry in about two months, will reduce the menace of unwanted promotional messages.”
TRAI officials met telecom companies including Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea on February 17 to review service quality issues, norms for 5G services as well as unsolicited commercial communications.
The regulator has made it clear to players that more stringent service norms are being worked out when it comes to calling quality standards and for this a consultation process will be initiated by TRAI in the coming months.
TRAI’s order to telecom companies to improve the quality of service has brought joy to mobile customers suffering from call drops and bad network. While 5G call data will be reported under the current system, separate QoS (quality of service) indicators will eventually emerge for these next-generation services.
“We are probing the issue of call drops and quality of service, and there has been an increase in complaints even after 5G is rolled out. We have asked operators to improve quality of service immediately, even before the rollout of 5G. Be it due or not services,” Mr Vaghela told reporters after the meeting.
He added: “The time has come to completely rethink the standards.” While the call quality benchmarks are being overhauled, companies will still have to report call drop and outage data at the state level, and perhaps later at the district level.
This means that the reported data will be more detailed and detailed (for 29 states) and averaged on a quarterly basis than the current practice of reporting data at the level of licensed service areas (22 LSAs in all).
State-level reporting will ensure that problem areas and patchy networks in certain states, especially the North East, can be clearly identified, and corrective action taken by the players. Mr Vaghela said such detailed reporting (at the state level) would start immediately, would be made part of the QoS norms and it would take some time to implement financial disincentives.
“We have decided today that we will also monitor the state-level quality of service,” Mr Vaghela said. Going forward, the parameters would be further tightened, he said, adding that a consultation paper would be brought out in this regard.
The authority has directed Telecom Service Providers (TSPs) to take immediate steps to demonstrate visible improvement in the quality of service and quality of experience by the subscribers. TSPs have been asked to analyze the issue of call muting and one-way speech and take corrective action. priority,” TRAI said in a statement.
While rolling out 5G networks, operators will need to ensure that there is minimal disturbance or degradation in service quality of existing telecom services. During the meeting, the telecom operators admitted that there were some “problems” during the rollout of 5G, but assured that they have now been sorted out.
“TSPs were further informed that TRAI is closely monitoring incidents of network outages of prolonged duration. Such outages adversely impact quality of services and consumer experience,” TRAI said in a statement.
“All telecom providers were asked to report such outages in any district or state to the regulator. If necessary, TRAI may consider bringing suitable regulation in this regard.
TRAI also asked players 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.
“Considering the scale and size of networks being set up for the rollout of 5G services, and the critical use cases being developed by various industry verticals, TRAI has mandated TSPs to provide 24×7 and 360-degree to implement systems for internal QoS monitoring on the basis of
“It was also suggested to exploit network features as per the standard and adopt AI/ML techniques for service quality monitoring and management,” the TRAI statement said.
During the meeting, the regulator also took stock of the issues of Unsolicited Commercial Communication (UCC), and stressed on the need to curb incidents of telemarketers misusing phone numbers to send promotional messages.
“We are also going to write to all major ministries and departments, RBI and other regulators… as they have significant influence over banks, financial institutions and other stakeholders. We are going to ask them to take action regarding the cleanup. ” Removal of message templates and unnecessary headers,” Mr Vaghela said.
States and departments are being sensitized as they also appoint telemarketers to send important information about the benefits of various schemes.
The telecom regulator on Thursday issued directions to telecom operators to act swiftly to stop misuse of headers and message templates as it ramped up unauthorized, harassing promotional messages by tele-marketers.
In order to prevent such misuse and curb unwanted messages, the regulator has asked access service providers (telecom operators) to re-verify all registered headers and message templates on the distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform and block all unverified headers and messages. The template has been directed to be blocked within 30 and 60 days. respectively.
“We are working on building a system based on AI/ML. Vodafone Idea has already implemented a sandbox experiment and it is successful, so we will use that. AI/ML telemarketers using 10 digit numbers Or allows spammers to be identified and they can be blocked… In the next two months we will be able to implement it across the country,” Mr Vaghela said.
A telecom operator attending TRAI’s QoS review meeting complained that quality of service was also being affected by some substandard handsets in the market. TRAI has advised companies to write to DoT to flag the issue of sub-standard handsets.