PTA conducts QoS survey in 18 cities: CMOs missed most of KPIs set in licences, regulations

ISLAMABAD: The Cellular Mobile Operators (CMOs) have missed most of the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) set in their license and applicable regulations with respect to SMS and voice services, revealed independent quality of service (QoS) survey carried out by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA).

The PTA has issued instructions to the operators for taking corrective measures, so as to ensure improvement in the service quality according to the licensed standards.

The authority has carried out an independent QoS survey in 18 cities and nine motorways/highways/inter-city roads of Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Balochistan in order to measure the performance and quality of CMOs’ services being provided to their customers.

During the survey, the licensed KPIs of voice, network coverage, SMS and mobile broadband/data were checked using state-of-the-art automated QoS monitoring and benchmarking tool.

The drive test teams selected survey routes in such a manner to cover main roads, service roads, and majority of sectors/colonies in surveyed areas. Based upon the compliance level of each KPI against threshold defined in the respective licenses and QoS Regulations, the CMOs have been ranked between 1st to 4th position in Mobile Network Coverage and Voice Services as per the compliance level in surveyed cities and motorways/highways.

Similarly, in mobile broadband speed segment, the ranking is determined with respect to the highest data download speed.

The survey results revealed that the CMOs are compliant with respect to broadband services to a great extent, while the SMS and the voice KPIs have been found below the licensed threshold in some areas.

As per the Next Generation Mobile Service (NGMS) licenses awarded, licensees are required to meet the threshold of - 100dBm or above of Reference Signal Receive Power (RSRP) with 90 percent confidence level. Zong was the only operator, which met the target in all of the 18 cities, followed by Telenor in 17 cities, Jazz in 14 cities, and Ufone in 11 cities.

During the survey, a total of 15,333 call attempts made and out of which 314 were failed attempts.

In 15,019 successful call attempts, 84 calls dropped prior to completion of two minutes duration, whereas, 14,935 calls remained connected for the complete duration of two minutes.

Telenor was on the top with respect to failed attempts with 120 failed call attempts, followed by Zong with 76, Jazz 60, and Ufone 58 failed call attempts.

A total of 15.325 SMS sending attempts conducted, out of which 15,128 SMS successfully received at B-Party.

Ufone SMS successful receive rate was 99.47 percent, followed by Zong with 99.45 percent, Jazz 98.5 percent, and Telenor 97.43 percent.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2022