The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) released draft regulations on Standards of Quality of Service for Mobile Data Services back in 2012 since there was no quality of service standards for the mobile data services compared to wired Internet such as broadband. It released a benchmark and asked operators to document data collection process for each Quality of Service parameters such as success rate, Average Throughput, Latency and more.
In December 2012 it also added minimum download speed to the QoS parameter and said that operators should measure the minimum download speed for each plan and report it to TRAI on a monthly basis, but it did not issue any minimum download speed for each plans. After complaints from the consumers regarding the poor download speed, TRAI has decided to implement a minimum speed for 2G, 3G and other wireless technologies.
Since the download speed would not be uniform across all areas, TRAI has calculated the average minimum download speed achieved during preceding three-quarters across all LSAs as reported by the TSPs in various plans and for different technologies deployed by them. In its tests, the 2G speed varied from 21.42 kbps to 97.06 kbps between the operators.
All the operators mentions data only by volume and doesn’t mention the minimum download speed in the respective plans, so it would ask them to mention the minimum download speed along with each tariff plan whenever they are advertised, through all the channels, including the official website. Here are the minimum download speed that TRAI recommends
- Minimum download speed CDMA 1X and 2G – 56 kbps
- Minimum download speed CDMA HSD – 512 kbps with 95% success rate
- Minimum download speed – CDMA EVDO and 3G – 1 Mbps with 95% success rate