ISLAMABAD: The Cellular Mobile Operators (CMOs) have paid Rs6.4 million, ie, only 16 percent of the total penalty of Rs39.9 million imposed by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) for poor quality of services (QoS).
Official documents revealed that the PTA has so far issued a total of 26 show cause notices to CMOs against poor QoS. A penalty of Rs39.9 million has been imposed on CMOs.
However, a total of Rs6.4 million has been paid out of the total imposed penalty and deposited in relevant government account, whereas, CMOs have filed appeals against rest of the cases and the same are pending adjudications in relevant courts.
The PTA being a regulator has two types of mechanisms i.e. Consumer Complaints and Quarterly Quality of Service (QoS) Surveys, which help the Authority to monitor mobile service including signal quality.
Quarterly QoS Surveys are carried out throughout Pakistan including Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) and Gilgit-Baltistan (G-B). It is an ongoing activity being carried out continuously throughout the year.
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The QoS survey results are shared with companies for taking corrective measures which ensure provisioning of optimum signal levels and service quality to consumers.
CMOs, after taking corrective actions including optimization of network etc, submit report to the PTA. The same are analyzed and randomly re-verified through field monitoring/QoS surveys. Upon un-satisfactory performance during verification surveys, Show Cause Notices (SCNs) are issued to CMO(s) found non-compliant to Key Performance Indictors (KPIs) defined in their respective licenses and QoS Regulations.
The PTA recently carried out an independent Quality of Service (QoS) Survey in 15 cities and eight motorways/highways/inter-city roads of Punjab, Sindh, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan, and Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJ+ACY-K) in order to measure the performance and quality of CMOs services being provided to their customers.
During the survey, the licensed KPIs of voice, network coverage, SMS and mobile broadband/data were checked using state of a art automated QoS Monitoring and Benchmarking Tool. The drive test teams selected survey routes in such a manner to cover main roads, service roads and the majority of sectors/colonies in the areas being surveyed.
Based upon the compliance level of each KPI against the threshold defined in the respective licenses and QoS Regulations, CMOs have been ranked between 1st to 5th position in Mobile Network Coverage and Voice Services as per compliance level in surveyed cities and motorways/highways. Similarly, in the Mobile Broadband Speed segment, the ranking is with respect to the highest data download speed.
The survey results revealed that CMOs are compliant with respect to Broadband Services to a great extent while SMS and voice KPIs have been found below the licensed threshold in the areas of Punjab, Sindh, KPK, Balochistan, and AJ+ACY-K. Eventually, necessary instructions were issued to the operators for taking corrective measures so as to ensure improvement in the service quality up to the licensing standards.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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