The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has strengthened reporting rules around base stations or mobile towers.
The regulator has asked operators to provide granular details like site location, radiating frequency, backhaul connectivity, technology utilised like 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G and time of commissioning of a site etc as it looks to improve quality of service (QoS) and address the problem of call drops. The telcos have to provide exact details of a site in a district or town, or a village as mentioned on the local government directory. Earlier, the data used to be submitted on a telecom circle level.
TRAI has ordered the carriers to provide all these details within 21 days of the end of each quarter, which comes into force with immediate effect.
As per TRAI, the quality of delivery of service of any base station is dependent on the type of backhaul connectivity. Therefore, the details of type of connectivity like fibre, wireless or others for each base station is essential to assess the impact of backhaul on QoS. In addition, a considerable number of 5G sites have been commissioned by telcos and services are being offered to a large customer base, so details of such 5G base stations and cells are essential for the purpose of assessment of QoS.
The regulator has also observed that in case of drop call rate (DCR) analysis, it was found that many circumstances reported to it for DCR, which are as high as 6.3 per cent, fall under the does not exist (DNE) code.
Furthermore, details of each cell under a base station with its unique cell global identity should be filled in separate row.
