allAfrica.com: Nigeria: NCC And Quality of Service Issues (Page 1 of 1)

These days, the talk in the country has shifted from people not having access to telephones, to occasional frustrations encountered in the attempt, either to make calls or send text messages, etc.

The situation is such that almost all Nigerians having telephone lines have become experts, so to say, in matters of Quality of Service (QoS). Why should it not be so, when telephone affects nearly all aspects of our lives? GSM not only provide access, it has revolutionised the way we live, socially and economically. It has provided direct job opportunities for thousands, as well as countless others in the ancillary services, thus helping to mop up a significant proportion of Nigerians from the unemployment market.

Many business matters are now being wrapped up on phone; this has helped to save cost on fuel and man-hours that would have been lost in the traffic while making unnecessary trips. The telephone companies also serve as huge revenue earners for the governments by way of taxes that they pay. For a sector with such profound impact on people's lives, the minimum that can be expected is efficiency, efficiency and all-round efficiency!

One can therefore understand the frustration of Nigerians when they are confronted with high rate of call attempts, high rate of drop calls and call interference as well as loss of audio, long delay in the delivery of SMS and high rate of frequent multiple delivery of same.

Nigerians may not know what telephony entails; at least they know when they are not getting value for the money they spend on their Global System for Mobile telecommunication (GSM) and other phones. As someone said sometimes ago, we may find it difficult to define the word obscenity, but we have no problem recognising one when we see it.

It is therefore not surprising seeing them complain when they find their telephone service providers wanting.

The frustration is understood. But it should also be emphasised that QoS issues in the telecoms sector are not peculiar to Nigeria. They are normal occurrences in all radio-based networks. Be that as it may, the point still has to be made that it is the responsibility of telephone service providers to deliver quality telecommunications services, QoS issues notwithstanding; they have to fashion out efficient and reliable means to reduce this to the barest minimum.

And this is precisely one of the things that the body charged with the oversight function in the telecoms sector in Nigeria, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has been doing, using all kinds of instruments. As a matter of fact, it had on occasions noted as unacceptable, the level of Quality of Service and used the carrot-and-stick approach in its quest to improve and ensure sustainable Quality of Service in the Nigerian telecommunications network.

As a matter of fact, it is not just the NCC that has been worried about QoS in the sector, even its board has had to intervene, coming up with all kinds of suggestions, to get the problem solved in the shortest possible time frame, to guarantee customer satisfaction and improvement in the economic, political and social development of the country.

The point I am trying to make is that the NCC has not been folding its arms. It has had to take certain measures to make the operators toe the line. There was a time the commission contemplated the option of issuing a directive to service providers to stop the sale and activation of new Sim packs as a way of checking subscriber growth and reducing network congestion. This might sound pleasing to the ears. But it will not necessarily translate to improvement in service. Outright ban on sale of new Sim packs is unrealistic and simplistic. The commission had to jettison this idea because of the attendant economic, political and social implications on the country. What with the negative impact this option would have on the livelihood of the large number of distributors, dealers and other numerous Nigerians who rely on this market for their daily sustenance. The commission was also conscious of the fact that its mandate is to ensure that all Nigerians have access to telecom services and not to limit it to just a few, as banning further sale of Sim packs would have done. Part of the answer was in the faster rollout of network resources and network optimisation, which the NCC board finally embraced.

Against this background, the Board mandated the commission to work with operators to ensure network optimisation and speed up the rate of deployment of new Base Stations, switches and transmission infrastructure, whilst making sure that service providers stopped all promotional activities that will lead to increase in the volume of traffic until such a time that there is substantial improvement in the Quality of Service on the networks.

At a time, the commission had to further issue directives stopping the service providers from placing any restriction or time limitation on validity of airtime credits so long as the poor Quality of Service persists, so that subscribers are not compelled to utilise their call minutes within restricted time frames. The commission believes that this measure will further reduce the pressure on the networks of service providers and thus contribute to an improvement in the Quality of Service.

Apart from these, the commission has had to address some of the issues through the many public fora that it has created for the purpose. For instance, it held one public forum on quality of service challenges in

June last year and another last month. This is aside other programmes like the Consumer Parliament, a consultative forum, and others designed to give all the stakeholders opportunities to rub minds and be able to better appreciate each other's challenges. As a matter of fact, the NCC has had to impose sanctions on some erring telecoms providers, where directives failed to achieve desired results, to serve as a deterrent to others, as well as compel them to perform better.

However, in all these, and in our quest to ensure that subscribers are not short-changed, there are certain basic facts we must not lose sight of. As I said earlier, QoS issues are not limited to Nigeria; they are issues of radio-based networks all over the world. Moreover, in addition to the regular challenges that telephone service providers contend with in many parts of the world, the country poses peculiar challenges that exert the service providers financially and sometimes put them at their wits end. These include power supply which appears worsening by the day; multiple taxation; non-abatement of the already significant capital and operating expenses; insecurity and vulnerability of telecommunications (just like PHCN cables and NNPC pipelines); administrative bottlenecks (import clearance matters, etc.); as well as environmental and community challenges, to mention just a few.

The NCC, obviously, is aware of these peculiar problems. And if it may seem it is not reining in the service providers enough, perhaps this is so because of the appreciation of these difficulties. We should not forget too that most of those in the sector are foreign investors and the way they are treated will be part of the considerations for intending foreign investors to come into the country or stay away. In effect, the best that can be done is for the NCC to continue to impress it on the service providers that Nigerians would take nothing short of quality services, and follow this up with appropriate sanctions as it has often done, when they refuse or fail to comply. But then, the government must also be ready to play its part by addressing those problems within its purview, which are militating against QoS in the telecoms sector.

Jimoh, a public affairs commentator

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