TRAI to release QoS regulations on mobile internet

The Indian telecom regulator, TRAI intends to regulate quality of services (QoS) on mobile data services to protect the interests of its mobile internet consumers. It has proposed a draft regulations on the quality standards for mobile data services. TRAI has invited comments from the stakeholders by July 25th, 2012.

QoS Parameters:

TRAI recommends that mobile operators ought to activate mobile internet within 3 hours of users request and with 95% success rate. Operators have to offer the successful download attempts at more than 90% and upload attempts at more than 85%.

The regulator mandates service providers to measure and report the minimum download speed to it. The average throughput for packet data should be more than 90% of the subscribed speed.

With regard to the percentage of Node B/BTS (3G base station), if it carries less than 80% of the average throughput in a license service area then the average throughput should be less than 10%. It has proposed the latency rates for audio at les than 150ms (milliseconds), video at less than 100ms, data at less than 250 ms, and Interactive data at less than 75ms. It has prescribed the PDP (packet data protocol) context activation success rate at equal to or more than 95%, and drop rate at equal to or less than 2%.

"Every service provider shall maintain documented process of collection of data for each Quality of Service parameter and submit to the Authority, within sixty days of notification of these regulations, the documented process of collection of data of each parameter indicating the correlation with the primary data which are derived from system counters or codes in Operation and Maintenance Centre or Network Management System or Mobile Switching Centre or telephone exchange, along with record keeping procedure. Providers will need to submit compliance reports, and inform the public about the parameters via its website or through newspaper ads," recommends TRAI.