New 4G, 5G mandate might soon be there for Jio, Airtel

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is reportedly planning to have new 4G and 5G guidelines for telecom companies. Despite claims of nationwide 5G rollouts, many mobile users in India still experience only 4G, even in major cities. Owing to this confusion, TRAI considers requiring telecom operators to display network coverage maps on their websites and is currently revising Quality of Service (QoS) benchmarks.

The regulator is planning to issue directives focusing on 4G and 5G availability by April-May. The mandate may have an impact on Reliance Jio and Airtel as Vodafone-Idea is still to roll out 5G services in the country.

"Consumers deserve transparency about network coverage," said a TRAI official, as per the report. He added, "Telcos should display these maps on their websites to inform users where they can access 5G or 4G."

Also, TRAI wants that operators should report outages of their over 400,000 5G base stations. "Downtime in specific areas significantly impacts network availability," explained another official. "Telcos need to report these outages."

The regulator is also planning to address the rising "call muting" problem, where poor connections force users to drop calls. "Packet loss leads to call muting," said a second official. "Since users have no choice but to disconnect, telcos must report these incidents as call drops."

The new TRAI Chairman appointed in January, Anil Kumar Lahoti stressed upon the need for stricter regulations to improve call quality. The regulator is planning for strict financial penalties for companies failing to meet QoS benchmarks at state and district levels, promoting greater accountability.

At present, at a wider "telecom circle" level, the QoS is measured. In case of an outage in a specific district within a circle, the data might not reflect the issue due to averaging. For this reason, a state and district-level measurement would provide a more precise picture, enabling targeted penalties for prolonged outages in specific areas.

However, the telecom industry opposes TRAI's proposal for state and district-level data collection. Their network rollout follows the telecom circle structure, and software systems are designed accordingly. Companies argue that sharing data state-wise would be complex due to the varying jurisdictions of licensed service areas.