Trai floats consultation paper to review network testing

This is the third crucial consultation that the regulator has floated after Jio’s launch in September last year

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India

Following complaints by telecom operators against Reliance Jio Infocomm (Jio) over subscriber enrolment during its test phase prior to rolling out commercial services, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Monday floated a consultation paper to review the various aspects related to testing of mobile services by operators before commercial launch.

This is the third crucial consultation that the regulator has floated after Jio’s launch in September last year. The other two being the review of regulatory framework for interconnection and the regulatory principles of assessing mobile tariffs.

In the present consultation paper, Trai said that there are no clear guidelines regarding network testing, time-line of testing, subscriber acquisition during the test phase, the number of SIMs that can be issued among others. Without naming Jio, the regulator said that so far no need was felt to specify aspects of testing, but last year an operator (Jio) tested its LTE network on a very large scale for which it enrolled lakhs of subscribers as test users before commercial launch of its services.

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The telecom operator contended that LTE/ VoLTE is a new technology and its throughput is dependent on Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) and the test trial is to estimate optimal network parameters for best throughput in a loaded condition, it added.

The regulator said that other telecom operators through their industry bodies complained that, “enrolling of subscribers and provision of service before commercial launch of services free of cost is generating non-level playing field conditions and that the volume of voice traffic generated by such test users, due to free offers, is choking Points of Interconnect (PoI) and impairing the quality of service of other operators”. FE