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Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) has finally published a set of Quality of Service (QoS) regulations for the country's telecom service providers.
Under the new regulations, the mobile operators will have to keep their call drop rate at less than 2.0 per cent. Besides, their average call set up success rate will have to be minimum 97 per cent.
The average call setup time of cellular and fixed telephony services will have to be less than 7.0 seconds.
The new regulations have identified specific QoS indicators and benchmarks for broadband, cellular and fixed telephony services as well as for billing accuracy and complaint handling.
"The new regulations are expected to enhance the quality of service of the country's telecom operators," said BTRC Chairman Md Jahurul Haque.
"The telecom regulator will take necessary actions, if the service providers fail to comply with the benchmarks specified in the regulations," the BTRC chairman told the FE.
"Hopefully, the regulations will help us to address various ongoing issues, like - call drop etc," he added.
As per the regulations, the broadband service providers will have to maintain a minimum download speed of 5.0 Megabits per second (Mbps), while maintaining a minimum upload speed of 1.0 Mbps.
The download speed of 4G services will have to be minimum 7.0 Mbps, while the speed will have to be minimum 2.0 Mbps for 3G services.
The portion of average packet loss, which measures the percentage of data packets transmitted from source and fail to arrive at their destinations, has to be less than 3.0 per cent.
Meanwhile, when it comes to billing accuracy and complaint handling, the telecom service providers will have to resolve their billing complaints within 28 days.
At the same time, 90 per cent of the customer complaints will have to be resolved within 05 working days, as per the BTRC regulations.
The new regulations have also empowered BTRC to verify and assess performance of the service providers against the aforementioned benchmarks on a random basis.
If BTRC identifies any shortcomings or deficiencies through such assessment, it will notify the operator concerned to resolve the shortcomings or deficiencies within 30 days.
The service providers will have to preserve their complete and accurate records, required to find the value of each QoS parameter, for at least one year.
They will have to submit monthly reports on compliance to BTRC with each of the QoS standards in the BTRC-specified format within next 10 days after the end of each month.
Every service provider will also have to publish its performance with respect to the benchmark of QoS parameters for information of the consumers, the regulations have mentioned.
At the same time, BTRC can publish compliance reports, results of drive tests or results of customer satisfaction surveys on its website or through media.