Bangladesh’s leading mobile phone operator Grameenphone has failed to comply with the benchmark set up by the telecom regulator over call drop.
Quality of Service (QoS) drive test result, carried by the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC), showed Grameenphone scored 3.38 percent call drop rate which was higher than the benchmark rate of 2 percent.
Second largest operator Robi achieved the call drop rate of 1.35 percent, Banglalink 0.58 percent and state-owned Teletalk 1.58 percent.
BTRC conducted the QoS drive test covering 1,350km areas of Dhaka City during Nov 6, 2018, to Dec 8, 2018, state news agency BSS reports.
Quality of Services, especially call drop is a long-standing issue and got momentum when it was discussed in the parliament.
Bangladesh has registered a total of 2.22 billion minutes of call drop in September 2017 to September 2018 where market leader Grameenphone contributed the majority stake with 1.03 billion minute. Robi and Banglalink positioned as second and third with the stake of 761.8 million minutes and 365.4 million minutes respectively.
In the drive test, BTRC benchmarked 7 second as call set up time, but the Grameenphone also took highest 10.14 second followed by Banglalink 7.69 second and Teletalk 7.11 second.
However, Robi has able to keep the set up time within the benchmark taking 6.15 second.
Besides, Grameenphone attained highest 99.04 percent rate in call setup success followed by Robi 97.89 percent, Banglalink 99.82 percent and Teletalk 99.12 percent although BTRC set limit 97 percent.
On the other hand, all private operators -Grameenphone, Robi and Banglalink have failed to comply with the 7 Mbps download speed fixed by the regulator for 4G service. Grameenphone scored 5.88 Mbps while Robi 5.91 Mbps and Banglalink 5.18 Mbps.
BTRC in a statement said the commission has been working as per commitment to ensure the QoS for customers’ satisfaction.
“The mobile phone operators have been directed to ensure QoS and there is no other way to avoid the directives,” added the statement.
Besides, Robi’s Head of Corporate and Regulatory Affairs Shahed Alam said: “We need to bear in mind that a drive test doesn’t give a definitive picture of the overall state of Quality of Service (QoS) rather it’s give an indication of a service at a specific time at a specific place.”
“It may be noted that we conduct similar drive tests regularly to assess our QoS. Since the regulator hadn’t shared the detailed data of the drive test, it is difficult for us to make a conclusion on our QoS based on their test results,” he added.