Consultation Paper on Quality of Service (QoS) - ICTA

Executive Summary
Pertinent recommendations, directives and guides related to Quality of Service (QoS) have been
issued by standard bodies such as the ITU and ETSI, most of which have been developed primarily
to assist operators in network planning and operation.
Recently Quality of Service (QoS) has also become an important aspect of regulation as part of
industry monitoring and consumer protection objectives. Some regulatory bodies have gone further
into enforcing quality of service through appropriate regulatory instruments e.g.
regulations/directives. These regulations/directives usually require operators to measure and report
the quality of the services they provide, which are then accordingly published by the regulators. The
latter may further set performance targets for operators.
In the same endeavour, the ICT Authority sets the obligation on licensees “to maintain quality of
service in accordance with international best-practices”. Although this requirement is in the form
of a licence condition, no framework has been adopted so far by the Authority for monitoring
quality of service. Our regulation also falls short of providing any QoS-related directives which
would help to improve quality of service and empower consumers to make informed decision about
the choice of services and service providers.
This consultation paper proposes such a framework with due regard to international best practices.
The first part of this paper broadly reviews, for general information, the QoS monitoring process by
quoting pertinent notes for most of the parts from ITU and ETSI documents. It further briefly
surveys international practices with regard to QoS regulation.
Although there are several standards describing QoS measurements, the question of which
indicators are to be monitored and the values which they should meet are still open. 1 The paper thus
makes a review of several QoS-related standards (as annexed). Information from these sources is
then used to define QoS parameters and to report target values. In some cases, the QoS parameters
and target values reported in this document are those which have been adopted by other regulatory
bodies. The services under consideration are mostly legacy services; however it is expected that the
framework proposed herein could be evolved to cater for next-generation services.
1 ETSI EG 202 009-1 V1.1.1 (2002-02), User Group; Quality of Telecom Services; Part1: Method for identification of
parameters relevant to the Users.
3