It’s been widely seen that, when a user subscribe to a operators data plan which offers certain speed for browsing like 3.6 Mbps download speed, we rarely get that speed. Usually the speed advertised by operators are just gimmicks for attracting users. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) in its latest guidelines has mandated telecom operates to provide a minimum quality of service for wireless data services in the country. The new regulation will come into effect from 1st day of January, 2013, thus making our new year more awesome.
TRAI while issuing “The Standards of Quality of Service for Wireless Data Services Regulations, 2012” have asked service providers in the country to set up a test set up consisting of servers and test probes to cover the entire geographical area of coverage of different data services in the licensed service area to ensure that they met quality of service benchmarks for the wireless data services.
According to TRAI every telecom operator shall meet the following Quality of Service benchmarks for the wireless data services (all parameters averaged over a period of one month)-
- Service Activation/Provisioning – Within 4 hrs with 95% success rate.
- Successful data transmission download attempts – greater than 80%
- Successful data transmission upload attempts – greater than 75%
- Minimum download speed – To be measured for each plan by the service provider and reported to TRAI
- Average Throughput for Packet data – greater than 75% of the subscribed speed
- Latency – Data less than 250ms
- PDP Context Activation Success Rate – greater than or equal to 95%
- Drop rate – less than or equal to 5%
To ensure all telecom operators follow this regulation TRAI, from time to time, through audit and objective assessments of quality of service conducted either by its own officers or employees or through an agency appointed by it, verify or assess the performance. Service providers are asked to fully publish the results of the audit and objective assessment through its website or through press releases or through advertisements in the newspaper.
Every telecom operator should publish on its website the details of all data services, being offered by them, along with their tariff, indicating the cities and towns to which such data services and tariff plans are applicable and shall not make any change in the existing data services and their tariff or offer new data services to the consumer without their prior publication at its website.
Source – TRAI