The telecomregulator will seek views of all carriers to narrow down on some areas of priority that it should look into in 2018, for which it will meet the companies in the first week of January, chairman RS Sharma has said.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) will also begin drive tests for measuring quality of data services on a granular level, and is considering adding the option of viewing speeds of all networks at one’s location or travel route in the MySpeed App, with the option for the consumer to choose that network. Both services will be greatly beneficial for consumers that typically face issues of call drops and inadequate data coverage in some instances.
“We intend to call a meeting in the first week of January of all telcos and ask them of the priority areas. These are important and strategic issues,” Trai chairman RS Sharma told ET. “We will also share with them the status or closure of the areas that we identified last year… we have broadly closed most of them and we will be closing them all by the end of this year,” he added.
Sharma said that the regulator was also preparing its own set of priority areas which it will look into in the new year, but said that the final issues would be decided after due consultation with telcos.
In 2017, Trai called a meeting on January 6 to seek telcos views and eventually zeroed in on areas such as tariff principles, disaster recovery communications, review existing telephone numbering plan, internet-based calling services, structure of universal services obligation fund (USOF), crowd sourcing of data for measuring service quality and next generation networks.
Besides the pre-decided issues, Trai also came out with consultations on aspects of data privacy and protection and the burning issue of net neutrality, a matter on which the regulator gave recommendations earlier this month ahead of the US voting to repeal its law which had supported a neutral access of the internet to all.
Sharma, who met US’ Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai last week in the US, said that the two regulators held discussions on net neutrality among other issues, but ‘agreed to disagree’.
“Every country is free to have its own policy, because ultimately it affects their citizens. Similarly, we will evolve our policy, we take it on our consideration,” the chairman said. Trai has a memorandum of understanding with the FCC inked earlier this year for mutually beneficial exchange of ideas through best practices sharing and bilateral workshops.
Back home, the regulator will take additional steps to make voice and data connectivity better for mobile phone users, as it will soon begin drive tests for measuring quality of data services on a more extensive basis, on the same lines that it conducts tests for measuring the quality of calls being made on telcos’ networks.
“The data drive test will measure upload speed, download speed, latency, browsing speed and streaming speed,” Sharma said. The information will be made public.
The regulator has also started working on improving its MySpeed app, which has been emulated by regulators in Europe, and will add option of viewing speeds of all competing networks at one’s location or travel route, besides his or her own network’s speed.
“If you’re on network A, you can see network speed and those of other networks, on a particular route. Then you can port to the best of the networks that offers you the best speed. This can work for voice also,” Sharma explained.
Source by:- telecom
Share: