The country’s telecoms regulator will get tough on mobile operators to ensure a high quality of service for consumers including publishing service guidelines so subscribers know their rights, according to a decision taken last week.
Last year, the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) gave guidelines to mobile operators to improve their service quality but it was not implemented by operators.
“The commission has taken the decision to publish a booklet to ensure quality telecoms services and to set parameters,” Md Sarwar Alam, secretary of the BTRC told the Dhaka Tribune.
He said the telecoms watchdog plans to make the booklet available to subscribers so that they are aware of their rights as consumers.
BTRC started to formulate a comprehensive set of guidelines on service quality in 2009. In January last year, at a commission meeting, the guidelines were agreed upon but not implemented fully.
Mobile operators have requested to meet with the BTRC before the fresh guidelines are finalised.
Under last year’s guidelines, operators would have to ensure a call success rate of 75% to maintain service standards.
BTRC sources said a meeting had been scheduled for January 13 where the chief executive officers of all six operators will be present.
Another senior officer of the BTRC said the commission had evidence that operators had deprived users mostly in regard to internet use and this would now be monitored. He said the BTRC would subscribe to various packages to monitor how well the operators were delivering on their connectivity and data commitments.
“We have decided to give customers automatic replies via SMS their balance after every use and now we are want to apply this to data use as well,” said the senior officer, requesting not to be named.
He said: “Some operators were found to have declared different offers on their Facebook pages without prior permission, so we will monitor operators’ web and Facebook pages regularly.”
Recently the regulator began monitoring operators’ advertisements and cross-checking what had received approval against what they were offering.
“The commission has taken the decision to publish a booklet to ensure quality telecoms services and to set parameters”
“We favour simplifying offers. We want advertisements that are clear cut and we want new offers in newspaper advertisements to be approved first,” he said.
Another Telecoms Ministry sources said some operators were using their subscriber base as an advertising market, sending advertisements without the proper permission of subscribers.
Under last year’s guidelines, operators would have to ensure a call success rate of 75% to maintain service standards. For data service, operators will have to maintain at least 80% speed rate of the offer announced.
The guideline said at least three call attempts out of four have to be successful to access the network to maintain service quality.
Quality of service parameters for mobile telecoms services introduced a new benchmark with 13 key performance indicators to assess mobile phone operators’ service quality. Generally, complaints against operators’ voice services are most frequent in Bangladesh, so regulators have concentrated on it.
The BTRC wants to monitor the quality of river, railway and highway connectivity where customers often suffer. Parameters have also been included to fix network congestion.
The regulator insists that operators respond well to customer care queries, and will monitor how they are dealt with and how they are responded to.
Despite a BTRC instruction to make 121 a toll-free customer care number, operators did not pay heed to the request. Instead, they made a separate number, 158, toll-free, but customers are unaware of the number.