The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission has decided to extend its quality of service (QoS) measurement test for mobile phone network coverage and capacity to upazila and village level.
The telecom regulator on February 19 issued an expression of interest (EoI) for the interested parties to conduct the test drive in designated highways, district, upazila, union and village roads and at selected spots.
The firm awarded the job will be conducting drive tests for measuring and assessing the coverage, capacity and quality of service of cellular mobile networks throughout the country.
The interested firms or joint venture companies were asked to respond to the EoI by March 15.
The tentative timeline of the test drive to measure QoS will be from May to October.
The firm/lead firm must have minimum two years' experience of measuring QoS of mobile operators through drive test, according to the eligibility criteria of the BTRC.
It also said the selected firm would provide competent personnel, vehicle, fuel and other logistic support for the test drive.
“This is the first time we are outsourcing the QoS test drive because considering the degree of the job. Earlier we usually did QoS test drives in metropolitan cities and in rather small scale,” a BTRC official told Dhaka Tribune on Wednesday.
He said now as the scale of the work was big, only a few of BTRC officials would not be able to complete the task within the stipulated time.
“After getting the proposals, we will send those to evaluation committee for short listing,” he said.
Last year, the telecom regulator conducted test drive in Dhaka and Barisal divisions to assess the quality of 4G service by mobile operators as per BTRC benchmark of 7 MBps download speed.
All the four mobile phone operators were found providing 4G internet service below the BTRC benchmark.
In Dhaka, as per BTRC finding, GP and Robi maintained the benchmark while Banglalink was providing service at 6.49 MBps and Teletalk at 4.85 MBps.
In Barisal, all the four operators failed to maintain the 4G internet speed as per the BTRC benchmark.
In a QoS test the BTRC checks call drop rates, connection times, uplink and downlink speeds of internet in the field level network towers.