T he Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, Dr Eugene Juwah, with a team of officials including the Executive Commissioner, Stakeholders Management, Mr. Okey Itanyi, and a host of others, last weekend, stormed Vanguard premises on a courtesy visit, where the team unveiled some of its agenda to lift the nation to the threshold of strong telecommunication countries of the world.

Dr. Eugene Juwah, Executive Vice Chairman/Chief Executive Officer, Nigerian Communications Commission during his visit to Vanguard. Photo by Lamidi Bamidele

Part of the plans they revealed to a select senior Editors that received them, was how NCC was going to take broadband to the nook and cranny of the Nigerian space through partnerships. They also highlighted the commissions resolve to see that nothing but quality services were given to telecom telecom subscribers and of course the foundations it has laid to supervise a successful SIM card registration in the country.

Our Asst. Hi-Tech Editor, PRINCE OSUAGWU was there to take notes. Enjoy the excerpts:

When are you  concluding registration of Sim cards?

Sim card registration is a project that has been going on for about a year before I came. Actually, a lot of project planning have been done. It is one of the first projects I have to confront, looking at what has been done so far and see whether it is up to my standard and see how to proceed further.

I’m happy to note that all the decisions taken on SIM card registration were taken by all the interested parties. The forum included all the telecommunications service providers, security services, the police, SSS, NSA and all other prospective service providers.

Along the line, a directive was issued to the service providers to start registering the new subscribers only. They went and started registering  the old subscribers also. That is actually, where the controversy started because by the agreement, they were to register new subscribers from the 1st of May 2010.

This  controversy later became very serious, the national security adviser, summoned us and everybody made their case.

The operators’ case was actually that they have spent some money doing the registration, for which they are worried that all their work will go down in vain, if the exercise is cancelled. Our own case was that the initial agreement was that they register only the new SIMs and should not have delved into registering old subscribers.

However, it was unanimously agreed after all deliberations that NCC alongside the service providers, do the Sim card registration altogether.

With the final passage of our 2011 budget in December, we really have authority to award contract on the SIM card registration to service providers and that, we have concluded.

The project of implementation has just started. By the end of this month, they will start rolling out to the streets. Although, the government has given us the end of June, to complete this exercise but  we could not start it together with Sim card registration, because the period of June started from January, we may conclude the substantial aspect of the registration by June, but may be it will be extended a little bit further.

The registration will cover every sim card. Basically, NCC has issued a directive to all  operators from 14 th of February, not to sell  activated new Sim cards. So, as from 14th of February this year, all the Sim cards coming into the market will not be active until, they are registered.

New sim cards will be registered by the operators, while the old sim cards will be registered by both  the operators and NCC. NCC has appointed seven contractors for the registration . One for each geo-political zone of the nation plus Abuja. So, all Sim cards will be registered by the time we conclude the registration.

All sim cards that remain unregistered will be stopped from functioning until it is registered. It is a mandatory exercise. This is a very important project and I think Nigerians will understand.
Besides forces of competition, is there what NCC is doing to further reduce tariff?

I have always been of the view that , it may be difficult to force operators to fix the price cap. But I know that competition will eventually lower price of services. When we were accused of not bringing price of calls down, we did not bother. But now, we can see that competition is bringing price down.

If you want to hold on your subscribers and not creating the chance of people leaving your network, then you have to give them a tariff that is acceptable to them. So, what is happening now, surely is price reduction induced by competition. And if, for example it did not happen, we in NCC are prepared to inject more competition by putting more licenses into the market.

What are the things you met on ground at NCC and things you are bringing in?

NCC is a continuity. In the past 10 years, we have been dealing with mobile voice, where NCC has done tremendously well, raising teledensity in Nigeria  from 400,000 to 78 million.

It is time probably to change gear. We cannot change gear completely, rather we have to consolidate on what has happened in the past. That is why the issue of quality of services is coming up again. We are insisting that the quality be improved.

We have been on that for quite for some time. What we have decided to do is to constitute a task force within the NCC to see what we can do to tackle  poor quality of service. We have just started a meeting with the stakeholders and we are going to use some key performance indices, which we know is going to make operators responsible for their actions or inactions.

In our own view, if they do not nip this loophole in the bud, then we penalise them.  NCC for some time has left the issue of quality of service as a self regulation on the side of the operators. It is getting  worse,  so we have to act now.

If you look at our adverts, you will discover that we advertised for quality of service measurement providers, where we have to go out on our own to obtain performance data, which we will use to compare the threshold that we have issued to the operators. There has to be some change in terms of quality being rendered via voice services.

….What are the things you are bringing in?

Unfortunately, we have not made much impact on data services. Although, we have it on GSM and CDMA services, but the capacity and reliability of such services are not what they should be. So, we are looking forward to help putting fibre in the ground. We are not operators, but regulators, so we  in conjunction with our international consultants have analysed and decided on a model we are going to use. The regulatory framework for that model and all the guidelines are been worked out right now.

Although NCC has always issued subsidies for people to build fibre and broadband infrastructure but there has also not been an impact. So, my view is to invest on fibre infrastructure deployment through open access model. This actually, deals with impediments to deployment like the right- of -way issue.

For example in Lagos, it is a very serious issue. I do not know how many thousand dollars you have to pay per metre, if you want to lay fibre.

So our strategy is to go into partnership with either state governments or local government areas, which ever authority that owns the right- of- way in that particular area, in conjunction with a technology solution provider, and together, we are going to build an infrastructure.

The way we structure it is that, the technology solution provider provides funding and technology. The state or local government provides the equity through provision of the right of way and NCC comes as a development arm of government. We are not there to make money but to subsidise and augment what the solution provider is doing.

In doing so, the primary infrastructure will be build on a community based network. For example, in an area like Apapa, we will build a number of infrastructure, in Lekki, we build one but all of them will be interconnected. This particular infrastructures will be run by licensed infrastructure providers. They are not GSM operators and when we license them to run these infrastructures, we make sure that all the service providers in the telecom sector will have access to the infrastructures on an equal basis.

The advantage of this model is that it removes the monopoly of big companies holding everything, and fixing very high prices, provides opportunity for small companies to also have access at the same price with big companies.

It will also make NCC free of accusations of competing with anybody rather position it as a regulator that has come to develop and bring Nigeria to 21st century with e-economy; Bring knowledge base to our children and adults. This is part of our agenda in the 2011 budget and once we succeed, it will be as revolutionary as the GSM.

How is this going to work with Glo1 and Main One already commercially launched?

These initiatives are shore landing cables. This will even act as distribution for them. Glo1 and Main One landed on the shores and have not gotten into the inland. So, to take them inland, this project will be a major vehicle.

It is so good listening to you and believing that it is going to work. But in most cases government gets the right framework but fails in execution. For instance you have State Accelerated Broadband Initiative, (SABI), Wire Nigeria (WIN) projects that were primed towards broadband for all. How is this going to work better than them?

I think, the function of government is to create an enabling environment. We are there to create enabling environment for the operators to function. The key is that stakeholders are coming together. There is the state or local government areas, there must be a technology solution provider company, which is completely a private company, which will provide most of the funding to build this infrastructure.

Then, NCC will be infrastructure operator. It will also be a completely private company that will run this infrastructure as a business. We in NCC are doing it for development of Nigeria. What we do is that we calculate how much to put, in the project to make it successful. So, it is not government project at all.

Government through NCC is only creating an enabling environment, so that fibre can be deployed because we discovered that the operators do not want to deploy fibre and even when they are, they are taking a long time to do it. What I’m saying now is being done in India and in a lot of countries in Europe, out-skirts of England.

Is there no regulation from NCC on benchmarking operators’ sales of SIM cards with their quality of service rather than allowing every service provider to continue amassing subscribers even when that causes congestion?

Number of connected lines, do not primarily cause congestion. There are many issues that can cause poor quality of service. I am not saying that congestion is not one of them, but I don’t think it is the primary one.

We have standards, and we have developed what is called key performance index to measure quality of service.

Today, NCC does not want to entertain excuses on what causes it or not but if our KPI say any operator is not meeting standards, drop calls are more than the threshold we have given or the call attempt  people make to reach another person  is more than the thresh hold, we will penalise the operator.

We have spent a lot of time trying to find what is behind poor quality of service and we believe that since there are few operators here, they should know what is causing it. What concerns us now as a regulator is the quality of service you deliver out there, not what is causing it.

We have started the process of licencing people with trusted and respected companies, both local and international to measure QoS on individual experience level.

The problem we were having before on testing quality of service was that NCC measured these indices, from the network centres of the operators.

Anywhere in the world, if you measure indices from the operating centres, it always show that it is working well even when what the individuals are experiencing is different.

What we have decided to do is to measure quality from the individual experience level. Now, all of the operators have realized that their services are not good and they are working hard to see what they can do.

But I can also tell you that at times they are not doing it deliberately. It is a technology issue. Remember that connections to their  base stations are by microwave. when it is raining, it affects all those microwaves.

In many places where there are better quality of service, connections are run by fibre. There are no towers and everything is run underground. The operators here ought to know that and should start to put broadband to power their base stations.

What we are telling them now is that they must increase their investment in the network. The sudden realisation that they are rather reducing instead of increasing their investment increase, is not going down well with the regulator. They have a duty to continue, replacing microwave with fibre to improve quality of service.

Although they are already beginning to, we are not also going to wait for them to reluctantly do that, we are going to monitor their compliance through our key performance index and penalise them when they do not meet expectation.

However, I want to also tell you that there are other issues about quality of service that are out of the control of the operators. The issue of multi regulation is very difficult one. There are also the issue of  when operators’ engineers go to rectify problems at the tower, they are being shot. These are issues that impinge on the quality of service.

Your operators power their base stations through a good number of generators at least two per base station. I was thinking, could it not be possible to have a common plant that can generate power their operations without replicating investments ?

Everything is possible but whether it will make  business sense, I’m not too sure. The base stations are widely distributed. The broadband will correct all their deficiencies. It is a new breed in Nigeria.

There was a team of experts from World bank with an initiative involving private sector on solar energy for telecommunication.

It is a new initiative, that will cost less than generator. What has happened is that solar energy has always have small capacity but it has been improving. It is coming to stage now, where it has started replacing generators. We are working with them. First of all, they are doing a market survey to know how base stations are, so that they can create their own zones. But this is going to be through an international tender where a renewable energy provider will take a zone instead of complete power plant.

In any case, the issue of power is being addressed by a project by government coming from the world bank.
Is there an initiative you have for renewal or  promoting teledensity through fixed lines, as you can see that most of the things are doing have been on mobile, is there anything, Nigerians can expect from NCC in that regard?

One of the benefits of putting fibre in the ground is that you will have fixed lines services much more capable than what you used to have.

The operators actually have their optic fibre but for a different purpose. They have to call back their traffic.

That is what they use theirs for. When you run fibre to the house, everything come through that fibre.  Video, data and voice services can come through it. And there is a technology today, in practice, fixed telephone using fibre. Because internet access comes through it, the voice is completely free.

You can talk where you have interconnection like in Nigeria and they charge on the other end. But where it have been practised, the voice is free of charge because you pay for the internet. We will soon get there.