Press Release Stakeholder meeting on Broadband Services to be called Soon May16 2018

Shri Sadhan Pande, Minister-In-Charge, Department of Consumer Affairs, Government of West Bengal, was speaking today at the seminar on “Information Disclosure for Broadband Services: Empowering Informed Choices in the 4G Era”, wherein he recognised the importance of broadband services. He further said that the state government has initiated many critical e-governance services for its citizens, which would be impactful if the quality of broadband internet is enhanced and is consistent.

In order to take this discussion forward, he announced that the state government would soon call a stakeholder meeting, wherein the state telecom operators, civil society organisations such as CUTS, BCC&I and Deepalaya, academia and other interest groups would be invited to deliberate on improving the broadband services in West Bengal.

CUTS International, in collaboration with BCC&I and Deepalaya, organised this half-day regional seminar today in Kolkata to highlight the need for Information Disclosure Mechanisms, and to discuss different perspectives on Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) for Broadband Services in India.

The seminar was a part of the Consumer Broadband Labels initiative, which focuses on designing a standard information disclosure mechanism, in form of a Broadband Label. Such labels are envisaged to help consumers in understanding their broadband plans better, and facilitate an informed decision making before the purchase of a broadband plan and also assessing the QoS being rendered, after sales.

Bratindra Bhattacharya, Director, CUTS International highlighted the importance of raising capacity of and awareness among consumers to demand better QoS and QoE of broadband services.

Angana Guha Roy Chowdhury, Deputy Director, BCC&I mentioned that the telecom ecosystem plays a huge role in offering connectivity and services to consumers and they must actively participate in such discources.

Pranab Kumar Ghosh, Secretary, Deepalaya, called upon CSOs to be more actively involved with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) by enrolling as Consumer Action Group (CAG) members and raise consumer issues related to broadband services at multiple forums. Discussions at the seminar suggested that there is a need to capacitate consumers with detailed information on broadband services and this information should originate from operators and should be available in public domain.

There was a lot of emphasis by the panellists and participants on driving investments into the broadband infrastructure sector beyond the tier-I areas of this region. Such investments and initiatives would help in bridging the digital divide within the region as well as across the country. The relevance of content and application developing ecosystem was also highlighted, as they would add value by giving their inputs and suggestions directly to the telecom operators on mapping the QoS and QoE of broadband services.

This seminar brought together around 80 representatives from the East and the North-East region of India, cross-cutting various stakeholder categories such as industry players, civil society, academia, individuals, etc. to constructively discuss the existing QoS mechanism, the challenges and the scope of improvement in the existing regulatory framework.


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For more details, please contact:
Arnab Ganguly, arg@cuts.org
Rahul Singh, ras@cuts.org