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NCC assesses mobile operators on service quality

By BusinessNews Staff on December 26, 2013

The performance of mobile operators in meeting the Key Performance Indicators set by the Nigerian Communications Commission will determine their fate, the regulatory agency has said.

The Head, Media and Public Relations, NCC, Mr. Reuben Muoka, said this in a telephone interview with our correspondent in Abuja on Tuesday.

The Executive Vice Chairman of the commission, Dr. Eugene Juwah, and Minister of Communications Technology, Mrs. Omobola Johnson, had threatened that the regulatory agency would impose sanctions on digital mobile operators if poor services persisted till the end of the year.

Johnson had said, “We are concerned that the poor quality issues still abound. I am inundated with complaints about quality of service and the seemingly uncaring attitude of our telecoms operators to resolve these issues on a regular basis. We will continue, through the industry regulator, to apply sanctions when operators fail to meet the required standards in terms of service quality breaches.

“Consumers cannot continue to bear the burden of poor service delivery. Though we are mindful that the operators are facing issues in deploying or maintaining infrastructure, we believe that the operators can do better in delivering acceptable quality of service, which they are clearly not doing now.”

But the KPI report of the mobile operators published by the regulatory agency in Abuja on Tuesday showed that the operators scaled through most of the benchmarks.

In the call set-up success rate, the regulatory agency had set a target of 96 per cent. In the result just released for the month of September, MTN Nigeria Communications Limited scored 97.74 per cent; Globacom, 96.49 per cent; Airtel, 96.46 per cent; and Etisalat scored 98.75 per cent.

The call set-up success rate measures the proportion of attempts to make a call that results in a connection to the called number.

Another parameter on which the operators were rated was call drop rate. This parameter measures the fraction of calls that are cut off due to technical hitches during a telephone call before the parties are through with their conversation.

On this indicator, the NCC had set a target of not more than 1.7 per cent. For the month of September, MTN scored 1.27 per cent; Globacom, 1.48 per cent; Airtel, 0.76 per cent; while Etisalat scored 0.76 per cent.

Traffic channel congestion is another indicator on which the operators were measured. On this, NCC had set a target of not more than 1.5 per cent.

For this, MTN scored 0.92 per cent; Globacom, 1.1 per cent; Airtel, 1.02 per cent; while Etisalat scored 0.17 per cent.

Muoka told our correspondent that the measurement taken by the regulatory agency for the fourth quarter of the year would be critical in determining whether the operators would escape sanction or not.

[Punch]

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