TRAI begins consultation to fix service quality norms for LTE calls

Telecom regulator TRAI today began an industry-wide consultation to fix service quality norms for voice calls on Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks.
The exercise is expected to culminate in framing of the parameters on call drops and service quality measurement for voice services to LTE users, much like the rules laid down by TRAI recently for assessing the quality of cellular mobile and basic telephony services.
"This consultation is focused and limited to QoS (quality of service) issues related to Voice services to LTE users e.g. silence or voice mute for VoLTE (Voice over LTE) users and voice call related issues experienced by users served via CSFB (Circuit Switched Fallback)...," TRAI said in its latest consultation paper.

The issues raised by regulator that will be debated over the coming weeks include whether or not prescribed parameters are sufficient to effectively measure service quality of VoLTE calls.
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has also sought the industry's views on what should be new parameters in case the existing ones are not sufficient.
The regulator has also asked stakeholders how instances of silence/voice mute should be defined.

"How many such instances may be accepted during voice call?" TRAI said and asked if existing parameters like packet loss, jitter, latency, end-to-end delay are sufficient to identify and measure silence, or voice mute.

The regulator has also sought a discussion on how a network or services should be evaluated from perspective of silence/voice mute issue.
The consultation paper, for which TRAI has sought industry's written comments by March 16, 2018, assumes significance in view of large nation-wide LTE deployment by Reliance Jio.
In fact, even established telecom operators like Bharti Airtel and Vodafone are in the process of rolling out VoLTE, offering users the flexibility of high-quality voice calls and fast data sessions in parallel.
Earlier this month, Vodafone announced rollout of its VoLTE services in Mumbai, Delhi-NCR and Gujarat and said that the services will be launched in Karnataka and Kolkata next, and thereafter across India in a phased manner in the coming months.

Voice over Long-Term Evolution or VoLTE is a standard for high-speed wireless communication for mobile phones that offers superior call quality and improved coverage and connectivity.