Trai releases consultation paper on bandwidth quality

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has sought comments of service providers on the quality of high-speed Internet services and access speed in a bid to strengthen the existing regulations.

In a consultation paper released today, Trai said that a need was being felt to identify easily monitorable and enforceable quality of service (QoS) measures for accessing speed to ensure that a bare minimum (floor) bandwidth is available with service providers for offering it to subscribers.

As the number of broadband subscribers rises and high-bandwidth demanding services like IPTV and peer-to-peer file sharing are introduced, the need for ensuring high quality broadband connections has been felt and hence QoS becomes very important, it added.

In order to monitor the QoS of broadband services, Trai had issued the Quality of Service of Broadband Service Regulations, 2006, which defined the various parameters such as packet loss, latency in the network and peak bandwidth utilisation.

"Monitoring of these parameters indicate the status of the congestion in the network. Service providers are expected to monitor their network and take corrective actions before the QoS is impacted," Trai said.

The internet subscriber base stood at 122.4 lakh at the end of September 2008, while the number of broadband subscribers was 52.8 lakh at the end of November 2008.

There have been many instances when subscribers allege speed of their broadband connections is much less than subscribed speed.

The last date for submission of comments is February 2, 2009, it added.