Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission has decided to deploy outsourcing agency to measure quality of services provided by the country’s telecom operators to their subscribers.
The commission made the decision last week at a commission meeting presided over by its acting chairman Md Jahurul Haque, a senior BTRC official told New Age on Thursday.
The decision was made as the commission found that checking quality of services provided by the telecom operators including access network service providers in extensive volume would be difficult for the regulator to check with its existing manpower, the official said.
To appoint outsourcing agency, the commission would float tender soon, he said.
Checking quality of services is very much essential for finding the lacking in services that the mobile phone operators along with other access network service operators provide to their subscribers.
BTRC statistics published in October this year showed that subscribers of the mobile phone operators lodged 1,496 complaints with BTRC in the July-September period this year regarding different problems.
Issues of complaints included customers’ dissatisfaction over network coverage, data package and volume offered by the mobile operators — Grameenphone, Robi, Banglalink and state-owned Teletalk.
The telecom regulator has been checking QoS of the mobile phone operators under a directive that was issued on August 24, 2017 meant for 2G and 3G service quality.
As per the integrated QoS regulations, which have already been approved by the telecom regulator and would be affective soon after publishing it as gazette notification, would also be applicable for all ANS providers.
The regulations will replace the existing directive issued by the commission in this connection. BTRC’s area of work would be vast once the integrated QoS regulations come into effect and it would not be possible for the telecom regulator to perform such a huge task with its existing manpower, another BTRC official said.
‘That’s why there is no alternative for the commission but to appoint outsourcing firm,’ he said.
Due to the manpower shortage, the commission has so far managed to measure service quality of the mobile phone operators only in the divisional headquarters and on the highways to the divisional cities from capital Dhaka. Apart from appointing outsourcing firm, BTRC also decided to take technical support from the vendor who supplied QoS measurement tools to the telecom regulator.
The immediate past BTRC chairman, Shahjahan Mahmood, in early 2017 had said that the commission would introduce ranking of the mobile phone operators based on their performance.
Under the BTRC directive of 2017, the operators were asked to ensure a minimum 512-kilobyte per second downlink speed of internet in 3G-covered areas.
The operators were supposed to ensure a minimum 50kbps upload speed immediately after the issuance of the directive and to increase it to 70kbps after one year.
The directive also asked the operators to ensure 95 per cent or more success rate in terms of establishing connection with the operators’ high-speed downlink packet access or HSDPA from users’ devices.
On the other hand, the mobile phone operators will have to maintain a minimum 7 megabyte per second (Mbps) internet speed for the fourth generation (4G) data service under the integrated QoS regulations.
Source: http://www.newagebd.net/article/54254/btrc-to-outsource-telcos-service-quality-checking