The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) said it would instruct all network operators to provide a report and an explanation of network problems experienced on June 30.

On Thursday, Vodacom suffered a network outage, after multiple transmission systems failed. MTN did not experience major network related issues on Thursday, but a data network issue affected about 10 000 of its subscribers for an hour.

The reports of the network failures came on the eve of the cut-off date for the implementation of the Sim card Rica process.

This request came along with the authority’s publication of results of a quality of service survey conducted in Gauteng in November 2010, revealing that mobile operators Cell C, MTN and Vodacom all failed to meet the minimum requirements for Call Set Up Success Rate (CSSR) and Dropped Call Rate (DCR).

“The results of the survey found that MTN did not meet the target in terms of CSSR, whereas Vodacom and Cell C have complied with this requirement. However, all three operators failed to meet the target in terms of DCR,” said the regulator.

The Gauteng region monitoring tests focused on network performance in terms of accessibility and retention of voice calls.

Regulations require electronic communications service (ECS) and electronic communications network service (ECNS) licensees to submit six-monthly reports on quality of service and standards to Icasa.

Icasa conducts tests to ascertain the quality of service provided by various ECS and ECNS licensees. The objective of the tests was to obtain a snapshot of an operator’s network performance from a user’s point of view. The quality of service monitoring was conducted through drive-testing, using the TEMS investigation tool. The draft results report was circulated to the operators for their comment, said Icasa.

Subsequently, a technical working group meeting was held with the operators on February 25, 2011 to discuss the results and methodology used. The authority received comments from operators and incorporated some of them in the final report, which Icasa said led to delays in the publication of this report.

The authority added that it continued to conduct drive-tests in Gauteng and in other provinces. These reports would be published, to enable consumers to make informed choices when selecting a service provider.

Icasa said that CSSR and DCR were some of the criteria used to measure operators’ quality of service and standards. Quality of service was, however, the collective effect of service performance, which determined the degree of satisfaction of a user of the service. In this context, it referred to the capability of a network to provide a quality service to selected network traffic over various technologies such as GSM.

CSSR referred to the number of attempts to make a call which resulted in a connection to the dialled number, where for various reasons some call attempts were not successful.

DCR referred to the number of calls which, owing to technical reasons, were cut off before the speaking parties had finished their conversation and before one of them had intentionally disconnected.