TRAI issues guidelines to ensure broadband quality

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has issued guidelines to all service providers (ISPs, UASLs, CMSPs, BSOs) providing internet/ broadband to ensure better services to their subscribers.

The regulator as asked service providers to provide adequate information to subscribers regarding internet/broadband services being offered and marketed as a good business practice.

They have also been asked to provide information regarding contention ratios adopted for different services by service providers in their tariff plans submitted to TRAI, manual of practice, call centers and on their websites.

Service providers should publish contention ratio for different internet/broadband services on their website quarterly to facilitate subscribers to take informed decision.

They should also ensure availability of minimum required bandwidth in their network according to maximum contention ratio suggested by TRAI for different services based on number of subscribers.

TRAI had, in October 2006, came up with a regulation on 'Quality of service of Broadband Service', which stipulated benchmarks for several parameters such as packet loss, latency in the network, bandwidth utilisation and connection speed.

The TRAI guidelines follow complaints from the subscribers regarding inadequate broadband speed that affects the performance of applications run by users and in turn restricts the utility of broadband connection.

TRAI said, it has considered comments of stakeholders and looked at international practices and the likely impact of regulatory intervention on pricing of existing internet/broadband plans.

Though the existing regulation stipulates parameters for speed of connection and bandwidth utilisation, monitoring of these parameters is complex, it added.