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BEREC consults on Quality of Service guidelines

Audience listens to the lecturer at the conference hall

During its 40th plenary meeting (3rd-4th October 2019, Crete) the Board of Regulators approved the draft BEREC Guidelines detailing Quality of Service Parameters for public consultation.

In accordance with Article 104 of the European Electronic Communications Code (EECC) NRAs shall take utmost account of these Guidelines when specifying quality of service parameters to be measured, the applicable measurement methods and the content, form and manner of the information to be published. By 21st June 2020 BEREC shall adopt the above mentioned Guidelines. The public consultation is open to 5th December.

The draft guidelines define:

  1. the relevant QoS parameters, including the parameters relevant for end-users with disabilities;
  2. the applicable measurement methods for these QoS parameters, including, where appropriate, the ETSI and ITU standards set out in Annex X of the EECC in relation to interpersonal communications services (ICS) and internet access services (IAS), respectively;
  3. the content and format of publication of the QoS information, and
  4. the quality certification mechanisms.

Several techniques can be used to measure different QoS parameters: measurements based on the actual occurrences, self-certification, survey, drive tests, probes on selected locations, theoretical values, crowdsourcing, etc.

Any techniques used for conducting measurements should be made transparent and available for third-party verification and, if feasible, to end-users at no additional cost, including end-users with disabilities.

Annex X of the EECC contains some basic QoS parameters and measurement methods for IAS. Concerning network performance, besides speed, the most important parameters, which influence QoS of IAS, are delay, delay variation (jitter) and packet loss.

According to the EECC, NRAs should be empowered to monitor the QoS and to collect systematically information on the QoS offered by providers on the basis of criteria which allow comparability between service providers and between member states. To achieve these objectives NRAs could require service providers to publish information having regard to different levels of aggregation (regional, national) or different groups of end-users (business clients, consumers), depending on the level of availability of information to the public, QoS parameter or service.

Within the consultation, BEREC would like to get responses to four specific questions: two relating to the detailed parametres of QoS in general and for the disabled; one on the publishing of information and one related to the certification mechanism of a measurement tool.

Photo Copyright: Adobe Stock | Anton Gvozdikov

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