Government concerned over telcos' service quality

NEW DELHI: 5G may be touted as one of the fastest-growing mobile offerings in India, but poor quality of services has raised concerns within govt, which has now decided to tighten the quality norms to ensure reduction in call drops and better internet speed.
"We are concerned on the issue of quality of services and are now looking at ways to strengthen the parameters that go into assessing mobile services quality," a top official with the telecom ministry told TOI.
Govt wants to "revisit parameters" that are assigned towards service quality, amid complains that consumers are not getting the promised services, despite India leapfrogging into 5G, supposedly one of the world's most advanced mobile technology.
As telecom ecosystem matures with abundant supply of spectrum and data adoption shooting up, quality of services continues to remain a nagging issue, often vitiating customer experience.
There have been complaints by customers and consumer groups about deteriorating services, even as telcos such as Reliance Jio, Airtel and Vodafone Idea argue that current quality parameters are sufficient and should not be "burdened" by new norms.

Trai has the mandate on quality of services and its new chairman Anil Kumar Lahoti has listed it among his priority areas. Expressing concerns over frequency of call drops and slow internet speeds, Lahoti has said that he wants "stringent regulation" and better implementation of standards to ensure better customer quality.
Trai had last year issued a consultation paper for review of quality of services standards where it acknowledged serious issues on network quality. Currently, Trai measures quality of services on a quarterly basis, giving average reports spread over large licensed service areas (LSAs). This, officers feel, fails to factor in dark spots with poor network coverage as overall results are an average of network throughout LSA.
Sources said as 4G and 5G networks provide much wider coverage across the country compared to 2G and 3G networks, the stringent performance benchmarks should be earmarked for them.
Telecom companies, however, argue that excessive regulations might not work. Jio said that introducing "overregulation and unnecessarily stringent benchmarks and financial disincentives" will impact the ease of doing business principle. "Furthermore, from our experience, we understand that the most complaints are about when the customer will get 5G and nearly none about the quality of experience on 5G. Evidently, there is no valid ground for making such massive changes in a regulation," Jio said in a representation to Trai.
Airtel said there are sufficient number of drive tests to measure network performance, and more stringent norms may not be needed. It blamed "other external factors" behind poor network quality. Also, it blamed growing usage of OTTs for some consumer experience disturbances.