The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) held a meeting with major telecom service providers (TSPs) in New Delhi last week to review the issues related to quality of telecom services being faced by consumers and the menace of unsolicited commercial communications (UCC).

The Authority has directed TSPs to take urgent steps to demonstrate visible improvement in quality of service and quality of experience by consumers.

TSPs were also asked to analyse the issue of call muting and one way speech and take corrective action on priority. While rolling out the 5G network, TSPs should ensure that there is least disturbance or degradation of quality of service (QoS) of existing telecom services, an official statement said.

TSPs were further informed that TRAI is closely monitoring the incidences of long duration network outages. Such outages adversely affect quality of services and consumer experience.

All the telecom providers were asked to report such outages to TRAI in any district or State. TRAI may consider bringing suitable regulation in this regard, if required, the statement added.

TRAI also asked TSPs to plan and implement systems for online data collection for QoS benchmarks and their processing to generate performance reports with License Service Area, State level or lower granularity. This will simplify the process of QoS performance reporting by TSPs, thereby reducing compliance burden.

Considering the scale and size of a network being set up for rollout of 5G services, and important use cases being developed by different industry verticals, TRAI asked TSPs to implement systems for internal QoS monitoring on 24×7 and 360-degree basis.

TRAI has also asked TSPs to implement two directions issued by it earlier this month in a time bound manner.

These two directions have been issued to curb the misuse of headers and message templates of principal entities by telemarketers and also the messages from unauthorized or unregistered telemarketers, including telemarketers using telephone numbers.