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Poor Telecoms Service Quality Caused by System Overhaul- Minister

By David Abellegah on November 8, 2012

Bad Network

Telecom service providers have attributed the poor quality service being experienced by mobile telephone users across the country to system overhaul, aggressive promotion of their brands, effects of flooding and preponderance of attacks by Boko Haram adherents.

These problems were disclosed by the Minister of Communications Technology, Omobolaji Johnson during a press briefing at the end of the weekly Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting yesterday.

She said, after many deliberations on the matter a consensus has been reached that the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) would play a decisive role in curtailing congestion of mobile telephone traffic.

According to her, the ministry has worked tirelessly in collaboration with state governments and other stakeholders to tackle the problem of poor service delivery by Telecom service providers.

She said state governments have been advised to remove some of the bottlenecks they have placed in the way of the service providers, which have hindered their optimal performance.

She said, “Today, I had cause to brief the council on an issue that affect over 100 million Nigerians and that is the issue of quality of service on our networks over an extended period of time.

“There are three major reasons why we are experiencing this poor quality of service. First is the pace at which operators have been investing in expansion, modernisation, and upgrade of their infrastructure to cope with the demand for voice, data, and Short Message Service (SMS).”

“The second reason is the promotions that we are seeing by the operators that is causing the degradation of the networks, promotions that ask subscribers to come back, promotions that promise cars, houses, aeroplanes,” She added.

“The third reason is the combination of the recent attacks on the base stations in the North-east and the flood in the southern parts of the country which have compromised the quality of service and led to both redundancies of those networks. We have been in discussions with the network operators, the NCC and we are working to improve the quality of service.”

She said they will curtail these problems by reducing the volume of promotions by service providers or halting the promotions completely.

“In the coming days, NCC would curtail or stop all promotions that either increase subscribers’ base that are the subscribers’ minutes or add to the subscriber base that are causing additional congestion on the network.”

The Minister also promised that the ministry would step up efforts to continue levying fines on erring service providers with whom there have been an agreement that they “would upgrade their infrastructure and meet the new quality of service indicators.”

“We also agreed that in December, we would do another detailed review of the quality of service indicator and any network operator that is found wanting will be appropriately sanctioned by the regulator.

“I think at this point in time, given the poor quality of service people are experiencing, we are not ruling out some kind of consumer compensation. We understand and feel the pains of Nigerians when you try to make phone calls and you cannot make them.

“On number portability, we will start the live testing of our number portability in December and we will go live in the first quarter of next year and that will give Nigerians the ability to move networks according to their preferences, which of the network they prefer based on the quality of the service they are offering. I think it is important to also say that we are encouraging investments into the development of our Information Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure,” the minister said.

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