Quality of telecom services in India still lacking

Telecom services sector has shown unprecedented growth during the financial
year 2003-04, mainly driven by intense competition and aggressive pricing. But
the increase in numbers is not enough. The quality of services should also be
improved with time.

According to a report released by TRAI of a survey conducted by IMRB to
assess quality of service provided by Basic, GSM and CDMA telecom service
providers for the period October-December 2003, both the objective audit and
subjective survey suggest that the basic services being provided are not up to
the desired standards. There is an urgent need for improvement of quality of
services among basic service providers.

The situation is quite bad in respect of following parameters - provision of
new connections within seven days, number of faults per 100 subscribers per
month, time taken to repair the faults, time taken to shift connection and
closures.

According to the survey, it is also observed that quality of services of
basic operators is at somewhat acceptable levels in metros and A-circles.
However, it is very poor in the B and C circles. Similarly, quality of basic
services in the east and north zones lag behind west and south zones by a fair
margin.

On the whole, it has been observed that cellular operators are providing much
better quality of service than their basic service counterparts. Fierce
competition in the cellular market has forced operators to constantly keep
improving their networks resulting in acceptable levels of service.
Nevertheless, the areas where there is scope for improvement are as follows:
billing complaint incidence, call success rate and accumulated downtime of
community isolation.

Compared to the service in metros, A and B circles, the quality of mobile
service in C circles is relatively poor. It seems that not enough investment is
being made by operators to improve their services in the C circles. It has been
observed that quality of cellular service needs significant improvement in the
eastern region.

The key concern areas for CDMA operators are billing complaint incidence,
billing complaint resolution and fault incidence, in that order. The performance
of the CDMA operators on the remaining parameters is good.

Based on this survey report and also the quarterly performance monitoring
report submitted by the service providers, the authority has initiated an
exercise to modify the QOS parameters wherever the prescribed benchmarks seems
unrealistic.

CyberMedia News

New Delhi