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Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Apr 22, 2004

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National

TRAI for improving basic services

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, APRIL 21. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India today underlined the need to improve the quality of basic telecom services while observing that cellular services had done better during October-December 2003.

Releasing the report of a Quality of Service (QoS) survey conducted by IMRB, TRAI said the situation was "quite bad" (in basic services) in respect to parameters such as the provision of new connections within seven days, number of fault per 100 subscribers a month, time taken to repair faults, time taken to shift connections and closures.

It said the quality of services of basic operators was "at somewhat acceptable levels" in metros and `A' category circles, but "extremely poor" in smaller States.

The report said fierce competition in cellular market had forced operators to improve their networks resulting in acceptable levels of services. However, there was scope for improvement in areas such as billing and call success rate. At the same time, the quality of cellular services in smaller towns (`C' category circle) was poor due to lack of investments.

TRAI said that key concern areas for CDMA operators were billing complaint incidence, billing complaint resolution and fault incidence. The performance of the CDMA operators in the remaining parameters was good.

In the case of basic services, TRAI said the East and North zones lagged behind West and South zones by a fair margin. Even in the case of cellular services, the regulator said the quality of services needed significant improvement in the East. TRAI has initiated an exercise to modify QoS parameters wherever the prescribed benchmarks seemed unrealistic.

According to the report, cellular players AirTel and RPG in Chennai topped the list of metro operators with 93 per cent of subscribers saying they were satisfied with the overall services offered by the two operators. Hutch in Chennai and AirTel in Delhi got 91 per cent rating in terms of subscriber satisfaction followed by Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited in Chennai with 90 per cent rating.

BSNL's services in Kolkata were rated the least satisfactory with 61 per cent rating, as per the TRAI's QoS assessment for cellular operators.

In the basic telecom services, Sunil Mittal's Bharti Group topped the list for its services in Delhi under the brand name TouchTel attracting 90 per cent rating followed by BSNL in Chennai at 89 per cent and MTNL in Mumbai at 84 per cent.

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