Mexico. Both affordable prices and the presence of quality in goods and services are indicators of a competitive market where consumers are maximizing their profit.
In relation to prices, the Mexican market for telecommunications services shows significant falls derived from the reform in this area, as well as due to the greater competition between operators.
The story is different when it comes to quality, as this is not an immediately identifiable characteristic on the part of consumers when choosing their telecommunications service. This generates significant information asymmetries between the plaintiffs and the bidders that prevent the former from making a decision that considers the characteristics of the consumer fully.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) states that quality of service consists of the "totality of the characteristics of a telecommunication service that determine its ability to meet the explicit and implicit needs of the service user". [1]
The international organization considers four perspectives from which it is possible to measure the quality of services. On the one hand, it can be considered as what the consumer perceives from the service and what he really needs. On the other hand, it is possible to understand the operator's quality objective, and how it actually achieves.
In Mexico, the consumer's perspective in relation to quality in telecommunications services was concretized through the agreement between the Federal Consumer Prosecutor's Office (PROFECO) and the Federal Institute of Telecommunications (IFT) from which emanates the Charter of Minimum Rights of Users of Public Telecommunications Services. [2]
Likewise, the statistics generated through the "I am a User" tool allow us to approach the consumer's perspective, since through it it is possible to measure the perception that people have of the quality of services.
From July to September 2017, the "Soy Usuario" system captured 3,526 user nonconformities due to service failures, resulting in an average of 38.3 nonconformities related to service failures per day. This meant an increase of 63.5% compared to the same period in 2016.
It is important to note that, in all the reports observed, mobile telephony and Internet services concentrate the majority of fault disagreements; however, the observations collected between July and September 2017 show a lower proportion of non-conformities for these services for the same period of the previous period, namely 10.2 percentage points.
In relation to quality from the consumer's perspective, in 2015 the preliminary draft was published that establishes the guidelines to set the quality indices and parameters to which mobile service providers must be subject in the provision of services to end users, which was submitted to public consultation and was approved at the end of this year.
These guidelines establish the key indicators to measure the quality of services in the networks themselves, which consider the proportion of interrupted calls, the SMS delivery time, among others.
On the other hand, it was recently published, for public consultation, the preliminary draft of guidelines that establish the broadband parameters to which internet access service providers must be subject. [4]
According to the document, the minimum parameter in the case of Mobile Broadband (BAM) with which the IFT will evaluate will be wireless connection to the public telecommunications network through LTE access technologies or higher, to transmit and receive information, which allows Access to the Internet at download speeds equal to or greater than 10 Mbps and upload speeds equal to or greater than 5 Mbps.
On the other hand, it is established that the minimum parameters of BAM mentioned, must be equal to or greater than 1 Mbps of upload and 4 Mbps of download for 2018, with increases of 3 Mbps per year for the Download Speed and 2 Mbps for the Upload Speed until reaching 5 Mbps of upload and 10 Mbps of download in 2020.
The definitions presented, in the process of public consultation, are fundamental since, being known to the consumer, they will allow you to verify if the operator complies with the service offered and will give you a tool to demand the service established in your contract.
In this way, the set of guidelines, the preliminary draft and the "I am a User" tool cited in this text allow measurements from the four perspectives indicated by ITU.
While the "I am a User" tool allows to measure the perception of the quality of services, the guidelines and the preliminary draft address the empowerment of the consumer by making the quality of telecommunications services a revealed characteristic.
Text written by Samuel Bautista of The Social Intelligence Unit.
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