Quality of service: telecom operators commit to more transparency

Recurring breakdowns, wild disconnections, hasty installations, damage to technical premises, etc. The quality of service of fiber optic networks is regularly singled out by local authorities and subscribers, exasperated by these serial malfunctions which are ruining their daily lives.

According to Arcep, the supervisory authority for the telecoms sector, outages concentrated on a small number of networks, located mainly in Île-de-France and comprising approximately 2 to 3% of the lines. “ For some of these networks, 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 drag their feet. Despite their commitments to quality of service – skills grid of technicians, certification of subcontractors, monitoring of interventions, etc. – improvement in the situation is slow to come.

The red rag of the Chaize bill

Speaker at Arcep’s annual “Connected Territories” conferencethis Thursday, September 28, Jean-Noël Barrot, Minister for Digital Affairs, waved the red rag of Senator Patrick Chaize’s bill, according to the Contexte website.

This text, to which the operators are categorically opposed, plans to increase Arcep’s powers of control and sanction and to suspend, on the customer side, the payment of a subscription in the event of repeated cuts. Patrick Chaize, also president of Avicca, an association of communities involved 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 infrastructure operators (IO), at the origin of the design of the networks, take back control of the connection.

70 acts of vandalism per month

The response was not long in coming. In a statementthe operators grouped within the French Telecoms Federation – Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom – associated exceptionally with Free, have committed to going further, by proposing additional 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 aim to share, in real time, information on ongoing interventions with infrastructure operators. This transparency must “ streamline the industrial processes of operators and various stakeholders and further increase their accountability. »

Finally, telecom operators point out that the deterioration in the quality of service of the networks is not their sole fault. On average, each month, there are around 70 acts of vandalism which, according to them, affect fiber optic networks. They are calling for increased criminal sanctions against the perpetrators of these malicious acts.