Though teledensity of India is increasing every passing day, but service providers seem to be quite reluctant to invest in their networks. The recent report of TRAI has also asked service providers to upgrade network for better quality of services (QoS).

At the highest level the QoS in telecommunications comes down to the two dimensions 'availability' and 'performance'. Availability refers to the degree to which a service is accessible whenever needed and wherever needed and Performance refers to the proper speed, response time, audio quality, video quality, or any combination of those.

In fixed line the quality of service is defined by time provisioning, MTTR, call success rate, voice quality, billing accuracy, dispute resolution, and promptness by customer care in attending customer request and issues. The mobile QoS include above plus increased reliability, high data speed, reliable content provider connection, accurate billing and multiple payment options, and reliable and any time available roaming connection.

The recent V&D survey substantiated the general perception of network quality. It's bad across India and worse in rural India. Both the GSM and CDMA networks score low on user satisfaction. Airtel (87) customers were most satisfied with their network while those of Reliance Telecom (74) and BSNL (75) the least. BPL and MTNL operators, who scored highest in overall satisfaction, scored 85 and 80 respectively. This clearly shows that customers are not really happy with any of the networks.

	EXPERTS PANEL
	Othmar Kyas, director-market development, Tektronix' Monitoring & Protocol Test business, PV Thamban, principal solution consultant, OSS, Agilent Technologies, India Shrikant Shitole, business development manager, Cisco Systems, India

Service Providers handle multiple type of customers that include enterprise, SME's and residential. They provide different type of SLAs to these customers. Also for each type of customer, they have different service offerings, which has been classified as platinum, gold, silver, bronze, and best effort.

TRAI monitoring
TRAI monitors the level of congestion at the Point of Interconnection (POI) between various service providers on a monthly basis. This parameter is basically to judge by which a customer of one network is able to communicate with a customer of another network. This parameter also reflects as to how effective is the interconnection between two networks. The constant monitoring by TRAI shows that degree of congestion between the operators is alarming. In a number of cities, the level of congestion between the networks of different operators is far more than this benchmark and the number of such places is increasing.

The country is adding number of subscribers every month and due to congestion level at the POIs in the inter operators networks; quality of service has become a major issue.

As per the TRAI's  'Regulation on Quality of Service of Basic and Cellular Mobile Telephone Services, 2005', the benchmark for POI congestion should be less than 0.5%. But TRAI's observation is that the performance of all the mobile operators with respect to the congestion on POIs has been increasingly deteriorating.

According to TRAI report in a number of big and small cities, the level of congestion between the networks of different operators are far more than the prescribed benchmark and the number of such places are increasing. This is mainly due to delay in augmentation of inter network junctions.

Challenges
Service providers face the ongoing challenge to identify the best metrics to describe the customer's perception of QoS and develop an infrastructure that enables the measurement of these metrics-starting from network performance data. Effective QoS enables customers to match their networks to their business needs, and helps service providers differentiate themselves from competitors and to scale capacity more effectively.

The key challenge for a service provider in a multi-play network is the fact that multiple applications (services) with very different QoS requirements and properties have to share a single transmission infrastructure. This can only be done efficiently, if for each service or service group QoS mechanisms optimized and appropriate for the very service or service group defined, implemented, and activated successfully.

At present operators have practically no real-time experience on the performance of various services being offered. Operators need to deploy proper OSS solutions to monitor real time end-to-end performance and troubleshooting applications.

An end user who takes a service from a service provider, who does not follow the best practices of deploying QoS, will face packet drops, transaction losses, delayed data which can result in severe financial losses to them.

Some of the prominent reasons of customer dissatisfaction are low quality voice, dropped calls, slow data connection, non-or delayed SMS/MMS delivery, blocked or non-satisfactory roaming.

It always comes down to availability and performance problems, which result in low usage, low customer satisfaction and loss of subscribers.

Until now, the approach to QoS has been based on reactive response to QoS degradation, mainly focusing on coverage issues or traffic congestions. Services offered in 3G networks are still in their infancy. Pricing for data-related services does not map to current performance in terms of speed of access, continuity and clarity of contents. User experience is impacted by the combined actions of such impairments, including pricing.  Added to this are two additional factors that will stress networks: complexity and volume.  Carriers, equipment manufactures and application providers need to implement a robust infrastructure that supports integrated, efficient QoS mechanisms to meet the desired quality levels for the new services.  New services are being developed to bring more value to end-users.

Also service providers do not have the correct information to know where to focus their troubleshooting efforts in order to maximize the performance.

Network performance, reliability and availability have become the single most impacting parameter from the subscriber's point of view. The other important parameter is billing services. Maintainability and help services are also important for basic service subscribers, although they are less important for cellular subscribers. Similarly, supplementary services are important for cellular subscribers, while they are not so for basic subscribers.

Solution
To rectify these issues service provider needs to deploy an OSS solution that monitors actual end-user traffic and utilizes this information to present the overall performance and quality of the network and services from many different aspects. This enables a wireless service provider to understand how performance and quality varies and is impacted by these different aspects.

Service Providers need to follow a common approach for deploying QoS in their networks. Proprietary solutions that offer resiliency in some parts of the networks, but are not able to work with the routing protocols, should not be adopted.

Operators have been taking various QoS initiatives over the years. Earlier they used to focus on the radio aspects and drive tests. Now that there is strong competition all around and standrads have gone so high that the operator can no longer limit itself to one particular network aspect. Therefore it is imperative to at least sort out these issues. Firstly, there is a  need to get a view of the QoS of every call made - despite the fact that there are millions of calls every day. Secondly, the importance of a QoS strategy per base station subsystem, network subsystem and per service (such as SMS or roaming). And finally, the need for a transparent reporting system that clearly displays the network service level.

For broadband take off, users need to have rich 'Content and Applications' and to take it off; there is a pressing need for better bandwidth on the broadband. Content providers and network service providers need to work together, hand in hand to tackle this issue. Both parties need to take initiatives from their side to succeed in this market.

Also trained manpower that understands various technologies is an important factor where operators have many challenges. Operators need to manage multiple technologies, multiple domains, and multiple content providers and still ensure that customers are getting the right QoS.

Bandwidth is a precious good in the mobile world. Throwing fiber at the bandwidth problem, as it was done for the Internet in the early nineties when the World Wide Web caused the Internet traffic to grow exponentially, is not an option. This is why intelligent handling of applications is important. Today, even if an operator do not get a 3G license, 2G-network infrastructure can be easily upgraded to deliver greater than 100kbit/sec bandwidth per subscriber for data services with EDGE, and GPRS CS4 technologies. With that, many services, originally believed only to be available on 3G networks, are also available on 2G and 2.5G networks.

Carriers have started to realize that in a 3G network QoS is crucial for a competitive service offering and meeting the expectations of customers. However, the actual implementation of QoS mechanisms at all levels is still at its infancy.

Predominantly operators follow a reactive approach in improving the QoS. To offer better QoS, operators need to be proactive and resolve issues even before customers notice.

Proactively understanding and defining the minimum QoS requirements for any application is key and the first step. Once this is done, these requirements need to be translated into SLA parameters which can be provisioned and managed, and which truly represent the performance of the service. From there the network can be prepared to deliver against these SLA parameters. A management infrastructure then need to be put in place which is capable of monitoring so called 'Key Performance Indicators', which characterize how a service is doing and to which the degree the network is delivering against the SLA in operation. And finally a feedback loop from the management infrastructure to the operation and optimization organization needs to be put in place.

Many corporate customers today ask for SLAs and many of the operators do not have a proactive SLA management tools in place. It is the service up and running to a satisfactory level that will fetch revenue. Also customer perception on type of QoS he receives also matters and that will essential decide whether customer is going to stay or churn. Therefore it is essential that SLAs be managed well.

Service Providers should start by addressing the market by offering managed services which allow them to handle the QoS right from one end of the customers network to the other end, thereby offering true end to end solutions.

In the first step QoS mechanisms have to put to work in homogeneous environments. Applications have to be able to talk to the network infrastructure and negotiate SLA contracts relevant for the QoS requirements. Then the infrastructure has to be able to deliver against these SLAs. Once this is working the QoS domain can be expanded towards heterogeneous and multi-carrier environments. Also operator needs to focus more on service and customer centric management from the present network management.

Besides rapidly expanding their network infrastructure, service providers need to have increased focus upon things like low cost international and national wholesale bandwidth, QoS, faster service deployment/provisioning and SLA commitments made to customers.

Technology Trends/Deployment
Till today, service providers have been building networks on a need basis. These networks have created islands for them and interconnecting these networks and maintaining a level of service is a key challenge as these were built using multiple technologies such as Frame Relay, ATM, and now IP/MPLS.

Also they should evaluate the various technologies and should take cues from the deployments worldwide.  The correct technology is the one, which will help them scale, offer newer services and there should be developmental work (IETF, IEEE, ITU) on it.

India is deploying some of the largest Metro Ethernet networks in the world. These will offer bandwidths unheard of in the Indian market to the end user from 0-1000 Mbps and even higher. Service Providers who are not having high capacity networks can ride on these networks to provide their end users a better service. The last mile solutions need to scale beyond just dial and low speed Cable, DSL, Wi-Fi to high speed Cable, ADSL2+ and Metro Ethernet. Multiple Wi-Fi or WiMesh can be also used to offer high bandwidths where the copper/fiber cannot reach or to offer quicker service setups. 

Service Providers are unifying their networks over a common IP/MPLS backbone. Thus the services, which they will deploy, will guarantee the QoS end to end. They should look at providing the end-to-end QoS solutions and follow the 'DiffServ' (Differentiated Services) model and base their equipment selection on this.

Service Providers need to look at standards based, that include IETF, IEEE, ITU deployments, which will help them in choosing the correct equipment to deploy QoS. Also they should look at the NMS, EMS, and inbuilt tools in the equipments that will help them with the deployment.

Benchmarking QoS
In the age of convergence, data with voice, fax and other streaming applications are posing new challenges for service providers to deliver QoS. Therefore to tackle these challenges, it is required to have capable benchmarking tools to determine whether the QoS technology is successfully delivering the results.

For data-only applications, QoS must transcend the simple, traditional requirement of bandwidth allocation and include loss and delay at various packet sizes ad traffic loads.

In voice, voice-quality metrics is added that include Mean Opinion Score and ITU P8C1 Perceptual Speech Quality Measurement, preferably in all languages the network will support. Although a very little emphasis has been given to it, network availability remains a major component of QoS. If the network includes packetized voice, then availability also includes the required resources to initiate calls and sustain them during peak utilization.

In spite of the challenge of these requirements, leading test tool manufacturers are introducing products with the features necessary to benchmark QoS components. Still, it's up to the customer to find the right products or, more often, the right combination of products.

That simply means defining, in advance, what features and applications the network would  support and asking the test equipment vendors for equipment measure applications, response time, voice quality report, and fitter measuring tool.

Every product cannot have a complete bouquet of features, but it's important to develop a portfolio that adequately benchmarks all the applications the network supports and be prepared for the inevitable unpleasant surprises. Even if equipment is working exactly as it's supposed to, QoS would require considerable tuning.

Service Providers say that they do their best to provide  better-than-average QoS to individual users. If demand for enhanced QoS are high enough, the operator generally choose which user should get priority. 

Most network operators incorrectly assume that QoS guarantees need only address certain network parameters, such as latency and error rates. However, QoS can incorporate any important service elements, ranging from installation guarantees to equipment repair and service restoration.

In the case of enterprises, operators understand that business application profiles drive QoS requirements. Such operators remain confused and unable to provide adequate service for enterprise applications. Unless operators begin a genuine effort to work with enterprise IT executives to understand the QoS requirements of their enterprises, and begin network tuning to satisfy those requirements, major disconnects will continue. Until such activity is well underway, it is doubtful that enterprise application will generate significant revenues for operators. Consequently, IT executives should prepare wireless business application profiles that define and detail their QoS requirements, and review this information closely and carefully with wireless operators during preliminary negotiations with them.

Normally phone users gauge service quality based on coverage area. A mobile customer expects better roaming coverage when it becomes a guest on a different mobile network and it should ideally be consistent. But the reality is, in today's complex mobile environment, service provider risk losing customers by providing spotty quality outside of the home area. And it's only getting more complex further. The cross technology handsets available today are capable of carrying high-value data and content and can easily be connected to any type of network based on signal strength. But different pricing models among operators make mobile quality and customer satisfaction a tough thing to ensure. Therefore a service provider is required not only to provide quality service to an end user. Overall customer satisfaction is equally important.

Rahul Gupta
rahulg@cybermedia.co.in