Quality of Service Presentation by Lizzy Tsheko

Botswana Communications Regulatory Authority

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Presentation Layout

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• Introduction

• BOCRA Mandate

• Regulated Services

• Concerns

• Analysis by BOCRA

• Challenges and Initiatives

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Why Regulate QoS

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– The Price-Quality Trade-off. • Price control of dominant companies is the most basic regulatory

task. Few question the need for price control. It has become an accepted wisdom that: “a fall in Quality of Service is a hidden Price Increase”. If not regulated quality may get worse.

- Protect consumers from monopoly power• A dominant company may be insensitive to its customers’ quality

preferences. Some aspects of service such as speed of fault repair may be offered at a level which is lower than what customers want.

- Informed choiceEven when there is competition there is a strong argument that published, comparable Quality of Service indicators will be needed to enable customers to choose properly.

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BOCRA Mandate

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• BOCRA is mandated to, among others, monitor and ensure that licensed operators are compliant with regulatory requirements including Quality of Service (QoS).

• BOCRA has continuous interaction with operators through meetings and/or written correspondence regarding issues that are of concern or that require regulatory/operator intervention.

• Site visits/inspections also assist in corroborating information received from operators.

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Which Services are Regulated?

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• BOCRA requires Public Telecommunications Operators (PTOs) to submit regular reports for purposes of monitoring to ensure compliance with targets as agreed between the PTOs and BOCRA.

• The reports are submitted monthly, quarterly and annually.

• Where PTOs fail to meet the prescribed Quality of Service standards, they are expected to give a reasonable explanation to that effect and also to provide an initiative put in place to rectify the problem.

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Regulated Services Cont…

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The parameters that MOBILE PTOs are reporting on as key performance

indicators are as follows:• Dropped Call Rate (DCR) - 2 %: refers to a percentage of the calls that were

cut before the speaking parties had finished their conversation.• Call set-up Success Rate (CSSR) - 98%: refers to the percentage of

originating calls that were successfully established by the customer.• Congestion Rate (CR) - 2%: refers to the percentage failure to access a traffic

channel during call set up.• Network Availability (NA) - 99%: refers to the percentage availability of the

network.• Handover success rate (HSR) - 95%: refers to the percentage of transferred

on going calls from one channel to another.

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Tools Used to Measure QoS KPIs by PTO’s

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The tools are summarized below;• BDREF: A configuration management tool used to monitor parameter

inconsistencies for proactive correction.

• OSIRIS: A tool for daily performance monitoring used by engineers to detect poor performing cells/sites with respect to different KPIs and use them to find cause and solutions to faults detected

• Daset/Voset Robots: These are put on different location to simulate customer experience and they perform end-to-end Network Performance for Data, SMS and Voice (2G/3G).

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Tools Used to Measure QoS KPIs Cont..

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• TEMS: Used to perform scheduled drive tests for network checks, it mainly measures quality of received signal.

• Network Counters: The counters cover many KPIs. The reports from the counters represent the general network behavior. The reports are generated hourly, daily and monthly.

• The operators use different tools to measure the KPIs. These tools are procured and installed by the operators. This adds an element of disparity, as it is possible that these tools are not measuring comparable results.

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Concerns

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• There is a limitation of aggregated data to show compliance to the agreed KPIs. In a typical day performance would vary depending on the time of the day depending on whether it is peak time or off peak. Therefore, even a daily aggregated performance of a base station is not very indicative.

• Operators have however indicated that they are capable of generating the KPI measurements with an hourly resolution. It would be more indicative to request the hourly performance of network stations.

 • To address the concern of aggregated data, BOCRA is proposing a new

reporting format on which the PTOs will be expected to give the performance of each base station per location, per sector, in order to isolate bad performing cells.

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Analysis by BOCRA

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• BOCRA receives network performance reports from the PTOs as generated from their networks.

• BOCRA then analyses the submitted reports to check for compliance with the agreed set targets as outlined in the QoS Guidelines. Any non compliance is flagged with the concerned PTO for rectification.

• BOCRA is in the process of coming up with the punitive charge framework as prescribed in the CRA.

• BOCRA is in the process of procuring a QoS monitoring tool which will also help to verify network performance updates received from the PTO’s.

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NETWROK PERFORMANCE CHALLENGES

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• Some of the challenges that PTO’s have reported to be the ones that hinders them from providing up to standard network are as follows:

Power Outages Transmission failure Battery theft and vandalism Lack of space for sites construction/expansion Technology constraints e.g spectrum Internal factors such as radio capacity High perusal fees and failure of land boards and councils to process

land applications at reasonable timeframes.

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PTO’S INITIATIVES

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• In order to address the challenges the PTO’s have embarked on projects such as:

Installing backup generators to assist during power outages

Engagement of security personnel and the police to curb battery theft and vandalism

Hardware upgrades to the latest software

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AVERAGED ACTUAL PERFORMANCE FOR THE THREE PTO’S FROM APRIL 2011 TO MARCH 2015

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Financial Year

CSSR (98%)

CONGESTION (2%)

DCR (2%)

NA (99%)

HSR (95%)

2011-12 94.04 1.09 0.27 99.4 97.5

2012-13 95.08 3.93 0.98 99.4 96.9

2013-14 95.83 3.22 0.88 99.4 97.3

2014-15 96.46 2.78 0.76 99.2 97.4

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THANK YOU LADIESAND GENTLEMEN

HAVE A PLEASANT DAY

Tel: 3685500 / 395 7755; Fax: 395 7976E-mail: info@bocra.org.bw,

Website: www.bocra.org.bw

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Conclusion