Greece is moving to make it easier for consumers to compare telecommunications companies on something other than price and advertised internet speeds: how long they take to fix outages, answer the phone and resolve complaints.
The Hellenic Telecommunications and Post Commission, known as EETT, has introduced a more detailed framework for measuring service quality across the industry. Under rules published July 22, the regulator is seeking to give consumers standardized data on what happens after they sign a contract—from waiting for a new connection to reaching customer support when something goes wrong.
The framework updates Greece’s 2021 quality-monitoring rules and puts greater emphasis on the overall customer experience. Providers will be assessed on network capacity, installation times, the frequency and repair of faults, call-center performance and complaint handling.
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Telecom companies will have to report how long it takes to activate a new connection and repair service disruptions. The data will include median repair times as well as the 95th percentile—a measure designed to capture the experience of customers who endure unusually long delays that might otherwise be obscured by an average.
For certain services, companies will also disclose the percentage of faults repaired within one working day. Some results will be broken down by administrative region, potentially highlighting disparities between different parts of Greece that national averages can conceal.
Call centers will face similar scrutiny. Providers will be required to publish the percentage of unanswered calls, median and 95th-percentile response times and the share of calls answered within 60 seconds. When a customer chooses to speak to a human agent, time spent navigating an automated system will count toward the waiting time.
Complaint handling will also become a formal performance measure. Providers must track complaints involving issues such as disputed sales, billing, delayed repairs, reconnections and service activation. They will report how frequently such complaints occur, how long they take to resolve and the percentage addressed within 10 days.
The regulator is also introducing more technical measures of network performance. Providers will monitor the utilization of connections between their networks and other networks at intervals of at least five minutes, publishing aggregated weekly data covering public peering, private peering and IP transit. The figures could help identify potential infrastructure bottlenecks, though they don’t directly indicate the internet speeds experienced by individual customers.
The full set of requirements generally applies to licensed providers with at least 50,000 telephone or internet subscribers. Smaller operators and resellers may face fewer obligations, creating a potential gap in consumers’ ability to compare the entire market.
The new system also has another limitation: Much of the data will be collected by the telecom companies themselves. EETT can conduct its own measurements or commission independent checks, but the credibility of the system will depend in part on how rigorously the regulator audits provider-reported figures. The underlying raw data also won’t generally be available to the public.
Still, the changes could alter how Greek consumers shop for telecommunications services. Instead of comparing companies primarily on monthly prices and headline broadband speeds, customers could also see how quickly providers install connections, repair outages, answer calls and deal with complaints.
