ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) aims to connect 75% of Pakistan’s population to broadband internet by 2025, WealthPK reported.
According to an official report issued by the PTA, Broadband Service Providers (BSPs) will be able to set a vast network of fiber cable and wireless internet in metropolises, districts, towns, tehsils and union councils using optical fiber cable-based fixed/wireless access with an average user data quantity of 50Mbps in its major cities in next three years.
The PTA report titled “Review of Existing and Formulation of New KPIs in Fixed Broadband Quality of Service” elaborated that 27.4% of wireless access network will be equipped by 2023 with Wi-Fi 6, the next generation standard in Wi-Fi technology. It improves the current 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard running in Pakistan.
The report said that 66.8% of wireless access network will be armed with Wi-Fi generation 5 by next year.
The regulator shall strive for the creation of fair regulatory regime to promote investment, encourage competition, protect consumer interest, ensure high-quality services, and create transparent environment across the board, the report said.
It is also proposed in the report that the methodology used for calculating upload speeds shall be similar to download speeds. The upload data amount must be at least 50% of download data amount and must be experienced during all the time. For example, if a package has a download data amount of 10Mbps, and the test is conducted for 100 minutes, the average upload data amount must be 5Mbps for 100 minutes.
The report said that the PTA is required to monitor the broadband quality of service provided by the service providers according to its key performance indicators, including committed bandwidth and outage commitments with the customer.
With the technological development and the introduction of G. fast technology, the theoretical speed has been enhanced to 1,000Mbps (max) along with the promulgation of WiFi-6 standard, where the data rates of 10Gpbs has been attained. The definition of minimum downlink speed for term “broadband” needs to be amended from 256kbps to 4mbps.
The PTA report elaborated that due to the growing number of subscribers, the quality of broadband services is of concern to the regulator.
As per PTA’s vision of “Protecting consumer interest and ensuring high quality ICT services”, these indicators are created to establish quantifiable and measurable standard parameters, which the service provider is entailed to provide and the user has a right to expect, thus invariably enhancing consumer satisfaction.
The PTA must ensure a level playing field, a competitive environment, subscriber satisfaction, and performance measurement with a common standard regarding quality of services (QoS).
Customers’ opinion should also be taken into consideration in this regard.
It is about time to set some benchmarks for the BSPs which they must comply with in order to ensure users’ satisfaction.
INP
