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BTRC moves to ease mobile users' woes

Md Hasan
The telecom watchdog is set to launch a benchmark for mobile phone operators to ensure quality of their services, a move that is expected to safeguard the users' interests in the Bangladesh's rapidly growing telecom market.
The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) has already prepared a draft guideline on 'Quality of Service (QoS) Parameters for Mobile Telecom Service' and sought stakeholders' views to finalise it.
QoS parameter has been in place in different countries like Australia, India, Malaysia, Pakistan and Singapore. The parameter is mainly set from customers' perspective by verifying what the mobile operators pledge to do and actually what they provide to the users.
In Bangladesh, the customers' complaints against the mobile operators' quality of services are nothing new. But besides the operators' customer service desk, there was no regulatory framework to ensure a minimum standard of mobile phone services.
Network disruption, call dropping, delayed connection, poor voice quality, interconnection congestion, abnormal bill and delayed services by the operators' customer care desks are the commonplaces for the country's 46 million mobile users.
The BTRC officials think the guideline will enable cus tomers to get better services from the mobile phone operators, as all parameters set by BTRC for QoS will be determined by survey reports on the customers.
"The market has reached such a point that we can set a benchmark for quality services," said a BTRC high official seeking anonymity.
The guideline is expected to be finalised within the next two months, the official said.
Customer satisfaction is the basic parameter to judge the QoS provided by an operator. However, the methodology to measure this parameter is highly subjective and requires due care to assess the level at which services are being rendered, says the BTRC draft guideline.
The BTRC will provide a set of questionnaires to the mobile phone operators asking the customers’ satisfactory level over the mobile service. Each question will have a certain point that will be justified by the QoS benchmark.
BTRC will consider some services or technical abilities of the mobile operators to justify the QoS.
"We welcome this initiative by the BTRC to develop QoS parameters for the mobile industry. For today's mobile operators, QoS is a critical differentiator because it is certainly a way to attract customers and reduce churn," said Rubaba Dowla, chief communications officer of Grameenphone Ltd.
Furthermore the parameters, when defined, will be directly relevant to business and business expansion for the operators. Among some of the challenges that lie ahead is active cooperation between the operators, government and the regulators for additional site acquisition in public areas, spectrum allocation, and adequate power supply, she said. hasan@thedailystar.net