The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) has finally published quality of service (QoS) reports for the 2012/13 financial year, covering Vodacom, MTN and Cell C's networks and services provided in the Gauteng, Eastern Cape, Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal Provinces.
ICASA initially indicated that it would publish quality of service reports every three months, but was held up because cellular operators had previously expressed dissatisfaction with its methodology. Its intend is to put out reports every three months, although the methodology issues still has to be sorted out.
ICASA's End-User and Subscriber Service Charter, which came into effect in August 2009, prescribes the minimum standard for network quality among SA's telecoms operators, with a view to improvement.
According to the charter, mobile operators (as well as other ECNS licensees) face fines for poor network standards. The drafted regulations require licensees to maintain an average of 90% fault clearance rate for all faults reported within three days, while the remaining 10% of faults reported must be cleared within six days of the fault having been reported.
In 2011, when ICASA published its last report based on those submitted by the mobile operators in terms of the charter, SA's three largest operators - Vodacom, MTN and Cell C - were found lacking. All three of them, according to ICASA's report, failed to meet the minimum requirements for call set-up success rate and dropped call rate.
The operators subsequently raised queries about the methodology adopted in ICASA's quality of service tests, and the regulator agreed to hold off publishing any further results until a methodology report was finalised. Since then the industry has been awaiting clarity.
ICASA's newest reports, which it says will be available online, includes monitoring through drive-testing, using the TEMS investigation tool. Drive-testing has previously been cited by operators as an unreliable method of tracking quality as it is too limited.
Missed targets
The authority says the focus of the drive-test was on network performance in terms of accessibility and retention of voice calls. The metric used to measure the above were call setup success rate (CSSR) and drop call rate (DCR).
"Quality of service is the collective effect of service performance which determines the degree of satisfaction of a user of the service - the capability of a network to provide a quality service to selected network traffic over various technologies such as Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM)," says ICASA in a statement.
Based on its results, Vodacom did not meet CSSR targets in the Eastern Cape, while Cell C and MTN failed to meet the same targets in the Western Cape. In terms of DCR, both Cell C and Vodacom did not attain the targets in the KwaZulu-Natal Region.
Telkom Mobile was not included in this round of monitoring of quality of service levels but will be included in future test samples once it has increased its mobile coverage, says ICASA.
"The authority would like to point out that the reported level of QoS results represents only a sample of the mobile service provider's network performance based on specified routes, at a particular time of day and a particular type of handset. Consequently, the results may not match the consumer's own experiences at a given time and locale," says ICASA.
ICASA says it would like to improve its reports and "encourages all consumers to continue engaging service operators in relation to network coverage and failures; and to further refer their complaints to the authority should they be dissatisfied with how operators have dealt with their network and service deficiencies".
It says this will it to cross-check data provided by the operators with data provided by consumers.
"The purpose of publishing these reports is to identify short-comings in the services offered by the three major mobile operators, and thereby promote redress in the public interest. It is hoped that, in future, when the authority has a more substantial budget and requisite monitoring equipment, it will be able to provide a full view of consumer experience of the services offered by mobile operators and thereafter refer matters of non-compliance to the Complaints and Compliance Committee (CCC)."
ICASA will continue consulting the South African Bureau of Standards' TC74 Working Group, which includes operators, to develop an agreed measurement methodology for quality of service on the access network. This could, in the long-term, lead to reports on agreed parameters such as coverage, accessibility, retainability and speech quality, it says.
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