Globe urges NTC to issue CDO vs Sun Cellular’s 24/7 service

Globe Subsidiary Innove Communications is urging the National Telecommunication Commission (NTC) to immediately issue a cease-and-desist order against Sun’s 24/7 call and text unlimited service, saying that Sun has violated the service performance standard requirements of the NTC.

During yesterday’s hearing before the NTC on the case filed by Innove against Sun operator Digitel Mobile Phils. Inc. (DMPI) for predatory and discriminatory pricing in its call and text unlimited service for P250 offering, Innove presented the results of a quarterly network quality benchmarking drive done not only on Globe’s network but to measure its compliance with said NTC circular but also to test that of other operators for purposes of benchmarking.

Globe Telecom said a drive test conducted by its engineers disclosed that competitor Sun Cellular has violated the service performance standard requirements of the NTC.

But Sun is now calling on the NTC to "revisit" its requirements to see if the standards are still applicable. "Since Globe’s Touch Mobile has decided to similarly offer a call and text unlimited service, the NTC may want to look at the possibility of having a separate set of standards for this kind of service. A new paradigm has emerged and obviously, there is a market for it. It is the customers who will have to eventually decide," Digital Telecommunications Phils. senior vice president William Pamintuan said.

The NTC under its memorandum circular 07-06-2002 defined grade of service (GOS) is the measure of the probability that during a specified period of peak traffic, usually the busy hour, call offered a group of trunks and circuits will fail to find an idle circuit at the first attempt.

The drop call rate (DCR), meanwhile, is the ratio of calls that are irregularly terminated to the total number of calls made during the measurement period.

The commission under the same circular requires cellular operators to maintain a GOS of seven percent and an allowable drop call rate (DCR) of five percent. Cellular operators are encouraged to improve the GOS by one percent and DCR by one percent every two years until the GOS is four percent and the DCR is two percent.

Globe and Innove maintain a GOS of 1.97 percent and a DCR of 1.68 percent, Globe wireless network master planning head Emmanuel Estrada said in his affidavit submitted to the NTC.

According to Estrada, a drive test conducted by his team of Globe engineers in January this year showed that Sun had a GOS of 35.4 percent for a 14-hour average and at one particular busy hour (8 to 9 p.m.), the GOS even reached 87 percent. Sun meanwhile registered a DCR of 5.09 percent for a 14-hour average and at a particularly busy hour (8-9 p.m.), it was 14.29 percent.

He said that based on previous drive test exercises conducted before the introduction of Sun’s 24/7 promo, Sun’s DCR performance was within the standard in the first year of operation until September 2004, the 24/7 service was launched in October last year.