TRAI launches portal to rate buildings on digital connectivity

Anyone who has signed a flat lease and then found that calls drop in the bedroom will see the point of this one. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Friday launched a Digital Connectivity Rating (DCR) Platform, a public portal where homes, offices and other buildings can be assessed and rated on how well they are wired for fibre, mobile and Wi-Fi.

The platform, live at dcrp.trai.gov.in, is the working end of TRAI's Rating of Properties for Digital Connectivity Regulations, 2024. Those rules were amended in May this year, and the regulator issued a detailed Rating Manual on 9 June. Until now the framework existed mostly on paper. The portal is where property managers, rating agencies and buyers are expected to actually meet.

How the rating process works

Property managers register a building under categories such as public, government, commercial or private. They upload the required documents, pick a registered Digital Connectivity Rating Agency (DCRA) and track the application online. The process covers both finished buildings and those still under construction, which matters because in-building cabling is far cheaper to plan at the design stage than to retrofit.

The rating agencies do the field work. TRAI has built a separate DCRA mobile app for in-building measurements, and readings taken on site sync with the web portal. Agencies record observations, attach test results and complete the assessment inside the same system. Certificates are signed digitally through eSign. The portal also takes fee payments and sends email and SMS alerts, and it keeps an audit trail of property records and test data.

The assessment itself looks at fibre readiness, mobile network availability, in-building solutions and Wi-Fi infrastructure. TRAI says the benchmarks differ by property category, so a hospital and a housing society will not be held to identical numbers.

What changes for buyers and tenants

For consumers, the key feature is a public search page. People can look up a rated property by name, certificate ID or location, open its digitally signed certificate and check that it is genuine by scanning the QR code printed on it. Properties can also be compared side by side.

That turns connectivity into something a buyer can verify rather than take on a broker's word. TRAI Chairman Anil Kumar Lahoti said the platform sets up "a transparent and standardised framework" for judging how ready a property is, and that searchable ratings would help people choose homes and offices with reliable connectivity for calls, downloads and online services. He added that it should push property managers to plan such infrastructure at the right stage of development.

There are limits worth noting. The regulator has not said how many properties or agencies are already registered, and rating remains a process that a property manager has to opt into and pay for. Whether developers treat a good score as a selling point will decide how quickly the database fills up. A building with no rating tells a buyer nothing either way.

Still, the problem it targets is familiar to anyone living in a high-rise. Thick concrete, basements and glass facades can weaken a signal that looks strong on an operator's coverage map, and the fix usually needs cabling and small antennas inside the building itself.

Queries on the platform are being handled by Archna Ahlawat, Advisor (IT) at TRAI, according to the regulator's release.