Assessing Quality of Service on regular basis
BTRC to appoint third party
Tareque Moretaza, Dhaka
The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) has started the process of appointing a third party for assessing the Quality of Service (QoS) on a regular basis.
Md Jahurul Haque, chairman of the BTRC, said, We have initially published the results of the BTRCs own test drive on February 18. The commission has taken the initiative to appoint a third institution to do this on regular basis in the coming days.
The appointed company will measure the Quality of Service (QoS) of the mobile phone operators and the results will be regularly published on the BTRCs website, he added.
According to the BTRC, the telecom regulator will introduce six servicesdesign and development of a complete monitoring (network, voice and data traffic, CDR, subscriber, services) system, as outlined in the tender documents; integration of the revenue reporting process and the automated audit system in the proposed system, in line with BTRC regulations; development, deployment, acquisition and installation of necessary software and hardware to implement the proposed system; ensuring the scalability of the system for future expansion aimed at incorporating all telecom operators; one-year operation and two-year maintenance of the system; and training of BTRC officials to ensure efficient use of the system.
The last date of sale of the tender document was February 3.
Earlier, in April last year, the BTRC had finalised a new set of regulations under which telecom and internet service providers would have to pay a penalty for non-compliance with the service standards set by the regulator.
The new regulation was gazetted on November 11.
BTRC Chairman Jahurul Haque said the new regulation will help customers get better services.
According to Section 3(D) of the new regulation, The BTRC may, on a random basis or in keeping with complaint(s) regarding the QoS issue on a specific zone or area, from time to time through inspection, sample test (or any other measurement method), either by its own officers or employees or through an agency appointed by it or joint measurement conducted with service providers, verify and assess the performance of service providers against the QoS benchmark of each parameter for telecom services.
The gazette states that the BTRC has fixed the time for disposing of customer complaints related to mobile phone bills within 28 days.
The BTRC has received a number of customer complaints in recent times about the QoS of the four telecom operators of the country.
A report published by the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) recently said that none of the top three mobile operators of the country had maintained download speed of the 4G mobile service within Dhaka city. While the BTRC approved download speed of the 4G service is over 7 Mbps, Grameenphone,
Robi and Banglalink maintained a download speed of 5.88 Mbps, 5.91 Mbps and 5.18 Mbps, respectively.
This is for the first time the telecom regulator has published the report on the Quality of Service (QoS) of the telecom operators in nine categories. Leading mobile phone operator Grameenphone has failed to comply with three out of nine QoS benchmarks, while Robi and Banglalink failed in two parameters each.
The BTRC report showed that GP failed to comply with call drop, call setup time and 4G data speed benchmarks.
The telecom regulator came up with the findings based on tests carried out during November 6 to December 8 last year at 15 zones within Dhaka city.
Under the tests, BTRC collected approximately 3,300 samples of service quality of the mobile phone operators.
