Comparable aggregated indicators of QoS in the telecoms market

Abstract

The Polish telecommunication company TP SA provides diversified services for alternative operators (AO). The quality of these services is measured periodically using the so-called Key Performance Indicators (KPI).

There are more than 500 alternative operators and 63 different KPIs that measure the quality of services. The Office of Electronic Communications (UKE) receives periodic reports for each operator with specific data which can be arranged in one table. This table has a lot of cells that are not filled and its structure may differ in time, which poses the problem of how to compare alternative operators and indicate eventual discrimination. Proposed was the concept of defining discrimination. This approach is based on some additional parameters, which were determined, however, they have not been collected so far.

The main challenge was to design aggregated indicators measuring the quality of services rendered by the wholesale telecommunication operator to alternative operators. The indicators must be comparable, i.e. they should indicate whether some AOs are favoured or discriminated.

As a result, two different methods of computing aggregated indicators were proposed. The first one, Principal Component Analysis, is based on the reduction of data dimension, which facilitates further analysis. It shows whether some AOs are treated in a different way, when compared with others. This may indicate discrimination.

The second method aggregates all values of KPIs and assigns a real number to each alternative operator. Subsequently, rankings of AOs treatment can be set up. This method enables detection of a discriminated operator and was tested in simulations.