Robi, one of the leading mobile phone operators in Bangladesh, is going to introduce a new quality maintenance solution by the end of this year to ensure better service for its customers in receiving data and the overall quality of calls, a high ranking official told the Dhaka Tribune after a press conference in the city yesterday.
The press conference was held to announce the selection of Ericsson Bangladesh Ltd, Nokia Siemens Networks Bangladesh Ltd and Huawei Technologies as Robi’s network partners in rolling out their 3G services in the country.
“Once the Customer Experience Management (CEM) solution is launched, we will be able to monitor service quality across the country live,” said AKM Morshed, Chief Technology Officer of Robi. “Monitoring will be in every five minutes, which might as well be live. The service will help us reduce call-drops and speed up the data service,” he explained.
AKM Morshed continued: “Problems will be detected before they are reported by the customers from Dhaka and also from Kuala Lumpur.”
The CEM solution will deliver active Quality of Experience (QoE) by collecting, correlating and graphically presenting, in real-time, a broad array of transactional performance and service quality data from Robi’s networks.
“But we will never go into detail what a user is uploading or downloading with this device,” he added.
Already, Robi’s parent company Axiata Group Berhard (Axiata) has launched CEM solution to their three operators in Malaysia, Indonesia and Sri Lanka this year. The company is spending a total of $60m for the service in these countries and Bangladesh.
AKM Morshed said Robi has already started installing equipment to establish the solution. “Hopefully, we can launch the service by December.”
Sources said there will be a dynamic dashboard in the shape of the Bangladesh map where bubbles of various colours will be displayed, indicating problems experienced by users. “Breach of privacy will never be a concern with this service. We will just monitor if there is any call-drop or the speed of data transmitting reduces,” Robi’s chief technology officer said.
Meanwhile, the selected three network partners will plan, design, deploy and maintain Robi’s 3.5G network, said the operator.
“3G services mark the beginning of the next phase of Bangladesh’s telecom growth and will elevate the telecom sector on par with most advanced telecom markets in the world,” said Robi Axiata CEO Michael Kuehner, adding “our priority is a quality customer experience rather than just a speedy execution.” He also informed that they are now in the planning stage for 3.5G service packages, which will take off soon.
According to Robi, 3G as a service has been operational in several countries since 2001. By these years of operation, the service has upgraded to 3.5G which is faster than 3G.
Meanwhile, the telecom regulator said Robi will not be able to maintain service quality as it has acquired only 5MHz spectrum on 2100 bands for 3G at $105m at an auction held on 8th this month.
When asked about it, Mahtab Uddin Ahmed, Chief Financial Officer of Robi, said: “As a modern operator, they first fix parameter for quality of service and then go into operation. The policy will remain same in the 3G service too.”
The press conference was also attended by other senior officials of Robi and representatives from the three technology vendors