Officials blame lack of equipment, manpower
The country’s telecom regulator is yet to start drive outside Dhaka for collecting mobile phone operators’ service quality information after nine months of issuing directive in this regard, said BTRC officials. The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission officials said the regulator was only conducting test drive in Dhaka and its nearby areas because of lack of equipment and manpower.
Under the Quality of Service directive issued in January the field survey report includes geographic area of the Dhaka and Chittagong metropolitan areas, and all districts and upazila headquarters, they said.
The BTRC QoS directive came following a trend of increasing call drop, poor network coverage and unsatisfactory customer care support.
According to the directive, the telecom regulator will publish a yearly ranking of the operators by analysing data collected from the customer survey, BTRC drive test and the self-reporting of the operators.
‘The BTRC is supposed to publish a yearly ranking, but as we lack manpower and logistics, we are yet to start the drive test outside Dhaka to collect the information,’ a senior BTRC official told New Age recently.
The QoS data are collected from two sources — one is switch generated which will be given by the operators from their own system and another is through field survey by running test drive, he said.
‘We have frequency test vehicle which can be used to check some QoS parameters, but the equipments have limitations,’ the official said.
‘The field test procedure also needs to be more precise in order to get the accurate data for analysis,’ he said.
The telecom regulator in the directive asked the telcos to ensure call success rate at 95-97 per cent with a maximum call drop rate at 2- 3 per cent. It asked the operators to submit the performance reports to the BTRC every month.
Although the BTRC asked the operators to disclose the reports to the customers, the format and time specification was not mentioned in the directive.
According to the directive, apart from 95 to 97 per cent call success rate and 2 to 3 per cent call drop rate, different types of network congestion, which might disrupt the call, cannot be more than 3 per cent.
The monthly completion rate for short massage service [SMS] has to be at 80 to 85 per cent, it said.
The directive also set acceptable number of customer complaints for the telcos and the response time for the customer care service.
The BTRC also set different standards for ensuring the service of base transceiver station and ports of connectivity.
-With New Age input
