The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission will set up an integrated telecom monitoring system in its office for getting live data to measure the quality of service and calculate revenue-related data of mobile phone companies.
The integrated monitoring system will be called Telecom Monitoring System, which will be comprised of two separate segments, BTRC officials told New Age last week.
The monitoring station installed at the BTRC will be a monitoring and data management system that will be treated as a telecom monitoring centre.
The TMS will act as the interface to monitor networks, data management and report generation. The other part of the system, Compliance Monitoring System, will be installed on the mobile phone operators’ premises.
The CMS will collect required network, traffic and billing data from the operators’ nodes and analyse those data to generate summarised report on indicators and compliance.
About the need for setting up such a monitoring system, the BTRC officials said that the commission needed an integrated network monitoring system to monitor telecom networks and services properly. The system will provide the BTRC with regular, live and effective telecom indicators, they said.
Additionally, the emerging, trustworthy and sustainable strategy for quality of service measurement is based on CDR (call detail record) analysis in real time, they said. But, non-availability of any such CDR monitoring and analysing system was the main bottleneck in developing a modern and widely acceptable QoS measurement technique for the commission, the officials said.
As the commission is responsible for security, monitoring and revenue collection of the telecom sector, it also conducts information system audit of telecom operators.
The current system of audit is manual, based on papers and past data records, which is inadequate most of the times.
Conducting information system audit under such haphazard documentations creates complexity for both the BTRC and the operators concerned. It is also a hindrance to developing further trustable relation between the BTRC and the operators.
The Digital Bangladesh initiative encourages the BTRC to develop an automated system for effective monitoring of traffic and auditing of telecom operators, the officials said. Besides, mobile phone operators are supposed to provide such system to the BTRC as per the licensing conditions.
To this end, the commission issued a directive to all the mobile phone operators to facilitate establishment of such a monitoring system. It asked the operators to provide all required data to the online monitoring system. Besides, the commission instructed operators to provide connectivity to all required data and network nodes, including all types of call detail record (CDR), event data records (EDR) and transaction detail record (TDR), intelligent network interconnection, recharging gateway, service nodes, mobile network portability gateway, HLR dump, provisioning gateway for subscribers, NodeB, RNC, eNodeB and value-added service usage logs.
Mobile phone operators were also asked to provide connectivity with all types of price plan configurations dump, rated CDR, itemised bills, billing records and account balance dump, the BTRC instruction said.
The BTRC directive, to be effective immediately, issued by its engineering and operations division director general Brigadier General Md Mustafa Kamal asked the operators to assist in integrating, modifying or enhancing the provision for the system at any time decided by the BTRC.
