Quality of service: telecom operators commit to more transparency

Recurring breakdowns, wild disconnections, installations made in a hurry, degradations of technical premises …. The quality of service of optical fiber networks is regularly pointed out by local authorities and subscribers, overwhelmed by these serial malfunctions that rot their daily lives.

According to Arcep, the supervisory authority for the telecommunications sector, the outages are concentrated on a small number of networks, mainly located in Île-de-France and grouping about 2 to 3% of the lines. « For some of these networks, the incident rates have been able to reach very high levels, up to ten times higher than the national average at certain periods. »

If the problem is identified, the operators seem to be dragging their feet. Despite their commitments in favor of the quality of service – grid of skills of technicians, certification of subcontractors, monitoring of interventions … – the improvement of the situation is slow to come.

The red rag Patrick Chaize

Speaking at the annual conference “Connected territories” of Arcep, this Thursday, September 28, Jean-Noël Barrot, minister delegate for digital, waved the red rag of Senator Patrick Chaize’s bill, according to the website Context.

This text, which is categorically opposed by the operators, provides for increasing Arcep’s control and sanctioning powers and suspending, on the client side, the payment of a subscription in the event of repeated cuts. Patrick Chaize, also president of Avicca, an association of communities engaged in digital technology, also questions the Stoc mode (subcontracting by the commercial operator).

This regime allows a commercial operator (OC) to entrust subcontractors or even subcontractors of subcontractors with connections to the subscriber. Which leads to a dilution of responsibilities. The senator proposes that the infrastructure operators (IO), at the origin of the design of the networks, take over the connection.

70 acts of vandalism per month

The answer was not long in coming. In a press release, the operators grouped within the French Telecom Federation – Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom – associated exceptionally with Free, have committed to go further, by proposing complementary measures to their previous action plan.

The four operators plan to increase transparency on the quality of their networks by providing new indicators. They also propose that Arcep, in its network quality observatory, not only measure the performance of infrastructure operators but also that of commercial operators, in particular through an indicator on customer perception.

Commercial operators also set themselves the objective of sharing, in real time, information on ongoing interventions with infrastructure operators. This transparency must” to streamline the industrial processes of operators and the various stakeholders and to further increase their accountability. »

Finally, the telecom operators remind that the degradation of the quality of service of the networks is due solely to their fact. On average, every month, some 70 acts of vandalism affect, according to them, fiber optic networks. They are calling for the aggravation of criminal sanctions against the perpetrators of these malicious acts.