Within the next three months, the Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) and the Ministry of Science, Energy, Telecommunications and Transport (MSET) will promulgate and operationalize Regulations relating to Quality-of-Service Standards in the telecommunications sector.
The Regulations will place obligations on licensees to measure and report on 21 fixed and mobile Quality of Service parameters. These include fault repair rate, dropped call rate, mobile network availability rate, internet broadband availability rate, latency and data transmission speed.
The rules will also allow the OUR to publish any information on quality of service so that the public can be made aware of any licensee that is not complying with the minimum standards.
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Govt Addressing Telecoms Quality of Service
Within the next three months, the Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) and the Ministry of Science, Energy, Telecommunications and Transport (MSET) will promulgate and operationalize Regulations relating to Quality-of-Service Standards in the telecommunications sector.
The Regulations will place obligations on licensees to measure and report on 21 fixed and mobile Quality of Service parameters. These include fault repair rate, dropped call rate, mobile network availability rate, internet broadband availability rate, latency and data transmission speed.
The rules will also allow the OUR to publish any information on quality of service so that the public can be made aware of any licensee that is not complying with the minimum standards.
On the matter of customer service calls, a minimum of 95% of these must be connected successfully and not more than 5% of the calls should encounter congestion, busy signal or no reply. A minimum of 95% of all calls should be answered within five rings by either an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system or a live customer service agent. If the customer decides to use a live agent instead of an automated one, then 95% of these calls must be in the queue for no more than two minutes.
In relation to dropped calls for mobile voice services, no more than 2% percent of on-net calls should result in dropped calls. For calls falling within the percentage of worst affected calls, no more than 3% must result in dropped calls.
The percentage of worse affected calls refers to the percentage of calls having a drop rate of more than 2% in the measurement period.
For the internet broadband availability rate, that is the probability that an end user can access the broadband services of his or her service provider, the target for this parameter is 99.95%. This target is applicable to all data networks and will be applied to all licensees who provide internet access services.
Still in telecommunications, over the last 9 months, a consultant met with government and private sector stakeholders to understand the emergency communications landscape and to make recommendations on how to enhance access to emergency communications.
Meetings were held with stakeholders including the Jamaica Fire Brigade (JFB), the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF), the Ministry of Health and Wellness (MoHW), the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM), Digicel and FLOW.
The consultant has prepared a preliminary report that recommends a more coordinated approach and within another three months, it is expected that these recommendations will be reviewed and approved by government stakeholders.
