A consultation paper on “Bandwidth required for ISPs for better connectivity and improved quality of service”, was released on Thursday by The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).

It is learnt that TRAI has issued this process to seek the views of the stakeholders so that it can develop a framework to fortify the existing regulations on quality of broadband service.

According to TRAI, there is a strong prerequisite to identify easily monitorable and enforceable QoS measures. This is mainly in regard to guarantee that a bare minimum (floor) bandwidth is on hand with service providers for provisioning of broadband and internet services with reasonable assured quality to its subscribers.

The regulatory body feels that the need to ensure high quality broadband connections have been emphasized due to the increasing number of broadband subscribers and development of various applications demanding high-bandwidth such as IPTV and peer-to-peer file. It may be here recalled that the number of Internet subscribers are 12.24 millions at the end of September 2008 and number of broadband subscribers are 5.28 at that end of November 2008.

Earlier, TRAI had issued the Quality of Service of Broadband Service Regulations, 2006 that defined the different parameters including packet loss, latency in the network and peak bandwidth utilisation.

"The concept of virtual office and remote office is gaining popularity. E-Commerce, E- health, Video world, Virtual tours and E-marts are some other emerging popular applications that require huge bandwidth which are also time sensitive. In such a scenario, quality of service becomes of prime importance," added the TRAI release.

The regulator has declared February 2 as the last of submission of comments by the stakeholders.