Comments
New Delhi, April 12
Citing discrepancies in the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (TRAI) speed tests app (MySpeed), telecom operators have written to the sector regulator to re-examine its processes, as it may defeat the whole purpose of creating such an app.
In a letter to TRAI, telecom industry body Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) has said that the test results of independent drive tests (IDT) which are carried out by TRAI presents contrasting findings when compared to the results of TRAI MySpeed App.
“Such variation among the published results is visible for several towns, and in certain cases, the variation in TRAI MySpeed results is very high [as in that of one telecom service provider (referring to Reliance Jio)] ,” it said in the letter. BusinessLine has accessed the letter.
The industry body referred to the TRAI white paper on ‘Measurement of Wireless Data Speeds’, in which the regulator had said that the results presented by this app regarding download and upload speed would act as a judgment criteria for the consumers in the process of service selection and positioning of TSPs.
“Hence, the validity of the results of TRAI MySpeed testing app needs to be examined,” COAI said in the letter adding that a meeting of all stakeholders concerned should be held to discuss and address the respective concerns.
COAI recommended that a much larger sample size (instead of 1,277 by TRAI) be considered to avoid the sampling adequacy issues and the analysis be carried out with better analytics/ tools to arrive at credible conclusions regarding the measurement outcomes of the MySpeed App.
Incorrect signal strength
Also, MySpeed App recorded different signal strengths for the same SIM when placed in different SIM slots. The signal strength was found to be recorded correctly when the SIM was placed in the primary slot but was irrelevant and very high when placed in secondary slot, COAI said.
It also mentioned in the letter that test samples were found to be collected from the water bodies for one of the TSPs and these samples were found to have speeds in excess of 10Mbps which is not practically possible.
“TRAI should look at this issue of spurious sample selection and help devising appropriate filtering mechanism to discard such samples from the data,” COAI added.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.