NTC says telcos fail to make the grade

The country’s telecommunications firms failed to comply with minimum service quality requirements set by the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC), indicating the need for companies to continue investing in their networks amid exponential traffic growth.

The NTC’s Quality of Service Benchmarking report for the third quarter showed leading network Smart Communications edging out rival Globe Telecom in all five service quality criteria, namely dropped and blocked calls, signal level and quality, and call set-up time.

But both networks failed to meet minimum standards for dropped calls. Results for Smart showed that 2.15 percent of all calls were cut during transmission. Globe’s score was worse at 2.75 percent, higher than the NTC’s minimum of 2 percent.

“The NTC has already informed Globe and Smart [of] the results. Their attention was called with regard to their failure to comply with the industry-accepted standard in dropped call rate,” the regulator said in a statement.

In the area of blocked calls, 2.54 percent of all Smart calls failed to connect on the first dial, well within the government’s 4-percent floor.

Globe was slightly behind with a score of 2.75 percent, but still within required levels.

For signal level, referring to the number of signal bars on a mobile phone during a call, Smart scored an average -61.14 dBm, while Globe’s score was at -69.1 dBm. Both were better than the NTC’s minimum -85 dBm, but the NTC, in its remarks, said “Smart had an edge over Globe.”

Both companies also passed in the area of signal quality, which measures the quality of voice transmissions during calls, Smart registered a score of 0.65 while Globe registered a score of 1.03. Both scores were within the acceptable range of between 0 and 4, with scores closer to 0 being better.

Tests were done during the month of September in random areas nationwide. A total of 2,189 calls were made using postpaid accounts. A similar benchmarking test was done for the second quarter, but that covered collected over three months, using prepaid accounts.

NTC common carriers authorization director Edgardo Cabarios admitted that the second and third quarter tests were not comparable given the differences in testing times. He said companies also prioritized postpaid over prepaid accounts in terms of service quality.

Cabarios said both firms would be given until Monday next week to explain why they should not be penalized for failing in the area of dropped calls.