Daily Independent (Lagos)
Emma Okonji
29 December 2008
Lagos — Telecommunications promotion has remained the joy of subscribers and the operators for obvious reasons, but such joy may be cut short again, should telecom operating companies fall below key performance indicators (KPI) set up by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the industry regulator.
NCC threatened to impose such sanction for the third time on telecom operators over promos if they fail to provide seamless and uninterrupted services at Xmas and in the New Year celebrations.
Making the warning to telecom operators in Abuja recently, Executive Vice-Chairman of NCC, Ernest Ndukwe, reiterated his promise to sanction erring operators whose network quality continues to fall below the accepted quality threshold. Operators, he said, must put the situation of erratic service delivery under control otherwise the commission would impose more sanctions including a ban on promos.
NCC had last year imposed sanctions on telecom operators by placing a ban on telecom promotions across networks, but later lifted the ban for Globacom after the telecom company made some impressive and remarkable improvements on its quality of service delivery. But again, the commission stopped all promotions across networks for the second time, including Globacom, when it became clear to it that the quality of service delivery dropped again.
NCC, however, lifted the ban again across networks when there was improvement and since then operators have been very careful in managing their network capacities in relation to volume of calls and SMS that pass through their networks.
Shortly after then, NCC devised a measure of publishing Quality of Service (QoS) results on a monthly basis, a situation that almost threatened the unity of telecom operators.
The commission went ahead to release the QoS result for the months of December 2007 and January 2008 and after that nothing was heard about QoS result in the telecom industry.
Unimpressed with the December 2007 and January 2008 QoS results, MTN and Zain went ahead to challenge the true state of the result that indicted them over poor quality of service and exonerated Globacom.
Both MTN and Zain had to challenge NCC, querying the yardstick with which the commission used in arriving at the results, which both operators felt do not reflect the true position of their networks.
The implication of the result was that both MTN and Celtel had poor quality of service for the months of December 2007 and January 2008 and their subscribers suffered a great deal of financial losses because of their poor networks for the months tested.
NCC then resolved and gave directives that each of the operators will pay compensation of N175.00 per subscriber for the month ended December 31, 2007 and January 31, 2008 for failing to achieve Traffic Channel Congestion (TCH) below 10 per cent levels in line with the key performance indicators published by the commission and issued to the operators on November 20, 2007.
Going by the QoS result for December 2007 and January 2008, one would have expected NCC to continue in the KPI tests on quality of service so as to keep operators on their toes, but it had not released any further results after then.
Now that the commission has threatened to impose another ban on telecom promos should network services tumble again, subscribers are watching the direction of NCC, as it relates to maintaining quality of service across networks.
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