Now, measure call quality on Trai portal

The portal will let users to see various quality parameters like call drops, coverage and call quality

Furthering its mandate to provide telecom consumers with better quality of services, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Wednesday launched a portal that enables users measure quality parameters like call drops, call and network quality of every operator in their locality.

Trai Chairman R S Sharma said the regulator would soon come out with another initiative that would let consumers rate the voice quality of their calls. “The portal can be described as transparency portal for telecom sector where whatever parameters of quality of service like call drops, coverage or call quality, telecom consumers’ will get information about them.”

He added the information would be on aggregate level as well as tower level. “If you are living in a locality, through the portal you can see the towers and network quality in that locality. You will be able to see towers and quality of each mobile operator in the area which will help you choose best operator,” Sharma said.

Asked if Trai would also audit the findings, Sharma said as a part of its mandate to regulate this sector, it continued to do regular audits of the data which will be done in case of this data also.

“By the way this was being received earlier also, the only difference which has happened is that data is now being received digitally and electronically from the service providers and therefore the delay has become very less and secondly it has now been put up in visual form, so as to give a clear idea as to what are the quality parameters of various operators,” he added.

The Trai chairman said the regulator also propose to have call quality satisfaction levels of consumers wherein users should be able to grade the quality of calls.

“So let people say how they feel about the call quality, which they are experiencing,” he added.

The initiative is on the same lines of My Speed Data app, which was launched by the regulator recently. The app allows customers to check data speed on the phones and share the data on the portal. The mobile app has seen downloads to the tune of 100,000 so far.

In the past one year, Sharma has taken various customer-centric initiatives like checking call drops through drive tests, launching of app to check internet speed and an app for registering complaints against pesky calls.

The industry, however, has not appreciated all his pro-consumer steps and on a few occasions directly confronted the regulator, like in case of call drop regulation, which mandated to compensate users of Rs 1 for every call drop, subject to a maximum of three call drops in a day. The industry challenged the regulation and Supreme Court later quashed it.